


Catch a Falling Star

by architeuthis



Category: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, DC Extended Universe, Justice League (2017)
Genre: Case Fic, Clothed Sex, Flying Sex, Getting Together, M/M, Mild CBT, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Porn With Plot, Semi-Public Sex, the Batsuit isn't exactly NOT a full-body chastity device
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2019-08-05
Packaged: 2020-07-31 14:47:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20116831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/architeuthis/pseuds/architeuthis
Summary: Bruce is in the middle of a stakeout when Clark returns from an offworld mission, full of ideas.





	Catch a Falling Star

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Superbat Big Bang 2019. Please, do yourself a favor and check out the art by G.G. Kinko [here](https://gg-kinko.tumblr.com/post/186782555070/title-catch-a-falling-star-author-architeuthis), and by mashimero [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20113822). If you like reblogging masterposts, you can do that [here](https://superbatbigbang.tumblr.com/post/186782740317/title-catch-a-falling-star-author).

The night sky flickered. Bruce raised his face from his binoculars and watched a line of light sketch itself across the black. The meteor must have been traveling hundreds of miles per hour, but from Bruce's far vantage it progressed through the heavens with stately slowness.

The atmosphere would pummel it to nothing soon. The card game Bruce had been pointing a microphone at for the last two hours seemed unlikely to produce any dramatic upsets or criminal activity in the next few seconds; he could take a moment to stretch his neck and watch the meteor burn itself out.

Instead, it bent toward Gotham.

Bruce's hand twitched. The dish of his parabolic mic wavered across Gotham's half-asleep sprawl below him. He caught a narrow slice of the city's night-time soundscape: a fraction of a laugh, half a guitar chord, an instant of a _bang_ that could have been a door slamming as easily as a gunshot, a single reverberation of flexing sheet metal, a mercifully truncated cat's yowl. He took another look through his binoculars — they were on the river and nothing more noteworthy than a low two pair was happening — and shut off the microphone. Whatever was about to happen might need his concentration.

The streak in the sky could have been any number of things, and Bruce was doomed to speculate pointlessly for the next twenty seconds. A visit from the League's new friends under the ice of Europa. Planetary annihilation. Something entirely new and unexpected that Bruce, with his endless planning and research and overthinking, could still never have prepared them for. Or....

He knew who he wanted it to be.

As Bruce watched, as he hoped, the incoming object drew close enough to discern as a wider brightness, the point of a pen drawing light across the sky. It was slowing, and as its reentry fire subsided it became just possible to discern that the shape inside that light was humanoid, then to make out a red smudge of cape, aglow with heat.

It was. It _was_ him. And his flight path didn't waver as he passed over Metropolis; he wasn't going home, as Bruce had assumed he would do when he returned. He was coming to Gotham, streaking over the bay. He was coming, it quickly became obvious, to see Bruce.

Bruce swallowed hard, while there was still a chance Clark might not hear it.

Clark halted in the air ten feet above the rooftop where Bruce had been wasting his night. His cape snapped around him, billowing and catching at his boots, and a breeze touched Bruce's face.

He looked — fine. They hadn't had much contact while he was away, thanks to the communication delay between Earth and Jupiter. It had been reasonable for Bruce to worry. But he was hale and whole, windblown and smiling. Gotham glowed on the planes of his face and the improbable contours of his suit.

"Hey," he said.

"You're interrupting a stakeout," Bruce said. His voice modulator turned it into a digital snarl. "Get down here before someone sees you."

"Wow," Clark said, but his smile didn't waver. "Great to see you too. How's your month been?" His feet touched down on the rooftop, and the folds of his cape settled around him.

"Nothing to report," Bruce said. "How did it go on Europa?"

Clark looked at Bruce for a moment, like he might press the issue, but blessedly let it go. He came up beside Bruce at the edge of the roof and scrutinized the next building over, a nominally abandoned warehouse with two rows of shattered windows gaping along its brick flanks. It was an empty shell of a building; from his vantage, Bruce had a line of sight right down to the ground floor, where the headlamps of a nondescript van threw harsh light over a folding table and three chairs. Apart from the ubiquitous Gotham rats, the card game was the only life in the building. Clark, with his superhuman gifts, would spot the subjects of this stakeout at once, but despite the grousing, Bruce knew better than anyone how unlikely an eavesdropping silhouette was to be spotted in Gotham. Even if it was floating.

"Really well," Clark said, leaning on the parapet. He folded his arms, crossed his ankles. "_Really_ well. Some equipment failures, a little internal politicking. Mostly, the Hreohzde are just so happy not to be running for their lives anymore that every day is like a vacation. They wanted to send me home with an armload of gifts, but I didn't think they would make it through reentry. Plus, I can't eat their food, and you guys _definitely_ can't."

"It's toxic to you?" said Bruce, already composing a note in his head.

"It's ... pretty disgusting," Clark said. When Bruce snorted, Clark smiled and tipped his face up to the dark sky, as though checking in with the Hreohzde across the millions of miles he'd traveled on the trip home. The moon had been flirting with some clouds, but it emerged now to touch Clark's brow, his mouth, the powerful curves of his arms.

The Hreohzde were a many-legged people with large black eyes and all of their organs visible, pumping under their glassy skin. They lived in a massive spacecraft filled with icy, pressurized water. Their appearance of fragility had made Bruce suspicious at once, almost six weeks ago now when Victor had first caught the distress call issuing from the edge of the solar system. What had brought Bruce around, as much as their request for asylum, the battered state of their ship, the sneering zealotry of the pursuing force, was how desperate and how fearful Clark had been to believe that they were as benign as they claimed.

This whole thing might have panned out very differently if Bruce had never relented, but he had looked at Clark's tormented face in the comms room of the half-finished Hall of Justice, and been infected, once again, with hope.

"Thanks," Clark said, still looking up at the stars.

Bruce mentally reviewed the last twenty seconds of conversation for anything that merited this and found nothing. He kept his mouth shut. Eventually Clark lowered his chin and looked at Bruce again; the moon lost sight of him and his features slipped back into darkness. "For letting me take this one," he said.

"Your abilities made you the obvious choice." It had taken the efforts of the entire League and then some to repel the Hreohzde's pursuers, but helping them troubleshoot their temporary settlement in Europa's ocean had been a one-Superman job. Clark also had the best luck pronouncing their language.

"The scout ship is working now. Arthur could have taken it. Or Diana, who they definitely assumed was, um, in charge."

"They thought we were her harem," Bruce said.

Clark laughed, throwing his head back so far that the light ran down his throat. "Flattering, right? Anyway, we had options. I know you get antsy when I'm off Earth for a while."

"Well," Bruce said, and looked unseeingly through his binoculars. He shouldn't have vocalized at all. Now it sounded like he had more to say, but there was no good answer to that one. Not in a conversation with a man-shaped lie detector.

When Bruce's refusal to hold up his end of the conversation became clear, Clark went on, "It was just nice to finally meet some aliens who weren't trying to kill or enslave anyone. They're good people. All of their festivals involve these elaborate hats that they handcraft at big personal milestones, so if there's a lull, you bring up hats, and the smalltalk practically makes itself for the next half hour."

That made Bruce look up again. The challenge he had heard in Clark's voice was there in his smile as well.

"I'm glad you had fun on the single most important diplomatic mission in Earth history," Bruce said flatly. "Is this going to be a full debrief, or can I get back to work?"

Clark reached out and took the binoculars and the microphone from Bruce's hand. He used no more strength than any Earthly man would have, but Bruce didn't bother trying to fight him about it.

"Was I unclear about this being a stakeout," Bruce said, through his teeth.

"So, thanks for encouraging me to hang out with some other aliens, is the point of this conversation," Clark said. His smile softened but didn't diminish. "It was thoughtful of you."

Bruce stared at him. "Fine," he said at last. "You're welcome. Are we done?"

"No," Clark said cheerfully. "I had a lot of time to think on the flight back."

"This should be good."

"Oh, it is. You know what? You're really nice to me."

So many rejoinders crowded behind Bruce's teeth that the press momentarily robbed him of speech. What emerged when he recovered came from farther down in him he had intended. "I tried to kill you." He bit his tongue before it could betray him again.

"Yeah," Clark said, as softly as a man at a funeral. "It would make sense if it were just guilt, or just for the team — and you are kind of a jerk about it. But I just spent a month in space, thinking about what it usually means when someone learns everything that matters to you and compromises to make it happen." He put the equipment he'd taken from Bruce down on the parapet: _click, click_. "And I started to think I might have a chance with you. After all."

Now Clark's smile did falter. He pressed his lips together, wet them with his tongue. His gaze rested hesitantly on Bruce's face. He looked like a man just coming to the limits of an impulsive and dangerous plan, an expression Bruce had seen on him more than once.

Blood roared in Bruce's ears. He took a half-step toward Clark. He would have stepped back again immediately, but Clark had mirrored him, coming just a fraction nearer and then pulling up short at the same moment Bruce did.

Clark laughed under his breath. "Thank God. I was afraid only one of us would be nervous."

He reached up and adjusted a fold of Bruce's cape where it lay over his shoulder. Not for the first time, Bruce was distracted by Clark's ungloved hands, his bare face and neck. Every other part of him was covered in whatever clinging alien mesh composed his suit, but he still exposed so much more of himself in their shared work than Bruce did. He would be feeling, right now, the texture of Bruce's cape between his fingers; through the layered armor of his own suit, Bruce felt only a faint vibration of fabric moving against kevlar.

Clark's hand lingered a moment, then touched the side of Bruce's neck. The sensation barely reached Bruce through his cowl, and it was no different when Clark put his palm on Bruce's jaw. He watched his own hand with inscrutable intensity, but when his gaze flicked up to Bruce's, the eye contact hit with such force that Bruce almost made a sound. He caught himself leaning forward, as though his body were searching for alternate solutions, if Bruce refused to take the final half-step that would carry him to Clark.

They needed to stop and think about this. It would change their working relationship. It would change the League, and by extension it would change the world. Its implications reached much too far for them to just rush into things.

Just looking had felt safer.

Clark's thumb brushed Bruce's cheek, just inside the edge of the cowl. Bruce tried and failed not to catch his breath. Clark had been unnaturally warm on each of the few occasions when he and Bruce had touched, but tonight his finger felt _hot_. Maybe it was the contrast with Gotham's cool night; maybe it was the lingering heat from reentry. From hastening back to Bruce from another world, so determined to see him that he picked a single dark figure out of a city of millions.

"Is it moving too fast," Clark said, "if I just—"

Bruce seized him at the waist and kissed him.

It was probably self-flattery to think that Clark was taken a little off guard, but that was certainly how the laugh he uttered into Bruce's mouth sounded. They were both too eager for a moment, and there was a clash of teeth. Clark pulled back fast, probably sparing Bruce considerable dental work; Bruce pursued him without thinking, but when their mouths met again, it was gently. Clark's arms came up around Bruce's shoulders, and Bruce ran his hands up Clark's back. 

He had thought it would be difficult to interact with Clark physically like this, to — to hold him. Clark was so strong — Bruce had devoted months to worrying about his incredible strength, and, from a certain perspective, had never stopped. Surely calibrating himself to safely touch a human must be difficult. If that was true, Bruce couldn't have said so just from kissing Clark; he let himself be pulled in toward Bruce's body, let his lips be coaxed open, let Bruce push him up against the parapet without offering any superhuman resistance. His mouth was unnaturally warm but mostly it was urgent, welcoming.

Clark was even breathing fast when Bruce pulled back. He looked out of sorts. His cape was caught between his body and the parapet; he swept it out of the way and sat.

"This is a stakeout," Bruce said, like a broken record. "I can't be—"

"They're on the — is the second card on the table the turn or the river?"

"Do you really not know the rules of Texas hold 'em?"

"The woman is named Gomez and she's won the last two hands. They're all bored and cranky. They haven't gotten 'the call' yet, but they also haven't said what this call is. I'm keeping tabs on them." Clark ran his blunt nails up the back of Bruce's cowl. The same gesture in a different context would have buried his fingers in Bruce's hair; in this one, Bruce had to infer where Clark was touching him from the sound it made.

It sent a shiver through Bruce anyway. Every inch of his covered skin asserted itself in his awareness, all of the places that Clark could not currently reach. The hair on Bruce's arms would have stood up, if it could have; his nipples hardened, and that wouldn't be all, if this continued. Of course Clark, in general the most inconvenient person Bruce knew, would choose to broach this subject now, when Bruce was locked up like Fort Knox and couldn't afford to be distracted anyway.

"It's good to know that I have your undivided attention," Bruce said.

Clark smiled in the shadow Bruce cast across his face, and leaned up toward him. "Are you going to make fun of me, or are you going to kiss me?" said Clark. He could have just risen from the edge of the parapet and been close enough to kiss Bruce. Bruce could have just stepped back and been out of Clark's immediate reach.

However much guilty, furtive introspection Bruce had devoted to the idea of this, he hadn't steeled himself against the prospect of a Clark who understood the effect he had on Bruce and was willing to use it to compel him. He was kissing Clark again before the thought had fully formed in his mind. This might be a huge problem.

Bruce would worry about it later.

For a moment Clark kissed him lightly, elusively, as though about to pull back and tease Bruce in turn — but before long he groaned into Bruce's mouth and pulled Bruce in closer, until their chests touched and his thighs bracketed Bruce's hips. It was just pressure to Bruce, without texture or nuance; he could barely feel Clark's body heat through his suit. But when he ran his hands down Clark's thighs, Clark caught his breath, and his hips rose off the edge of the parapet.

The material of Clark's suit resisted bullets as readily as Clark himself did, but it also gave like a second skin under Bruce's gauntleted hands. What did Clark feel through it, with his tremendous senses? Was he this worked up about the _concept_ of Bruce touching him, or was he worked up about Bruce _touching him_, in a way Clark actually felt?

If Bruce put his hands on Clark's ass and hitched him higher, until his groin met Bruce's own firmly enough for even Bruce to almost feel it through his suit's uncomfortably tight cup—

Clark made a little sound in the back of his throat that Bruce wanted to hear again as soon as possible. He hooked his ankles around Bruce's calves and his elbow around the back of Bruce's neck, and held Bruce's face with his free hand as he kissed him. His hips rolled against Bruce's; Bruce felt no friction, but caught the faint vibration of the textures of their suits interacting.

For the first time tonight — the first time since Clark's return to life — Bruce felt Clark's strength clearly. Beneath the superficial pliability of his suit and all the pleasant, giving shapes of Clark's body, Bruce felt the iron of tensed muscle that his fingers could not dent, even when Clark was performing a feat as small as holding up his own weight in Bruce's arms.

Bruce bit involuntarily at Clark's lips, dug his fingers into Clark's ass in harder than he would have let himself do with perhaps anyone else. His pulse throbbed in his crotch. He hadn't exactly had sex in mind when he designed this suit, and he was painfully, desperately confined now that Clark had given him a good reason to get hard while wearing it. More than half an erection might not be possible, but Bruce's body didn't know that, and it was going to try.

Clark seemed to be having no such trouble, if the way he was moving against Bruce was any indication. Now that Bruce had had the thought, he wanted to look down and confirm his suspicions almost as much as he wanted to keep kissing Clark. He was holding up most of Clark's weight, but Clark could fly — surely it would be safe enough to let go of him with one hand, and reach down between their bodies to see if Clark was hard, and if Bruce could feel the shape of him through his suit. Clark could be pressing an erection up against Bruce right now with Bruce none the wiser. And if this friction was doing something for Clark, then what about Bruce's hand — what if he could stroke Clark through his suit and Clark would respond to it, with his quick urgent noises, with the movement of his hips—

Clark jerked upright in Bruce's arms. Bruce neither dropped him nor lost his balance, but it was a near thing. "Oh God, wait."

"Sorry," Bruce said at once. Jesus, he had practically been about to jerk Clark off on a rooftop. "That was too fast. We can—"

"No, it wasn't," Clark said quickly. "It's not you, it's the call — hang on."

Bruce held his tongue, as though whether he made noise now would make a difference to a man who could eavesdrop on a phone conversation taking place in the next building over. It gave him time to think, which, in the circumstances, Bruce neither wanted nor appreciated; he directed as much of his attention as he could to staying upright with most of Clark's weight resting on his shoulders and hands. This wasn't the most gruelling endurance test of Bruce's week, but Clark was even heavier than he looked. Bruce would have questions about that later.

Eavesdropping sharpened Clark's expression. Bruce watched Clark's eyes wander over nothing as he listened. He saw, as well, the moment Clark realized Bruce was still holding him up — perhaps the moment Clark realized Bruce had been holding him up in the first place. Clark turned scarlet and lost about two hundred pounds in an instant. Even his hair seemed to weigh less; it curled differently about his ears as gravity's hold on it eased. Bruce would have questions about that later as well.

For now, Bruce bit back a groan as the weight on him eased. Best if Clark didn't think he needed to go easy.

Clark put one foot back down on the roof, then the other. His arms began to slip from Bruce's shoulders. He was right; this interlude had been thrilling, but it was time to work now.

Nothing below Bruce's neck had gotten that message. And above it— He felt a momentary terror that when Clark stepped back the last few minutes would slip away, that Clark would be satisfied or would simply come to his senses, and the matter would not arise again. It had taken Clark to break the tension between them, with a bit of honesty and a bit of insight; left to his own devices, Bruce could have spent the rest of his life admiring Clark as an out-of-reach wonder. If Clark reconsidered now, would Bruce even be able to find it in himself to ask why, or would he shove it down like he did everything else?

No. Whatever Clark might be, he wasn't flighty or cruel. If he wanted to drop Bruce like a hot rock, there would be some excruciatingly earnest conversation first. It wouldn't be a surprise.

Bruce reached out anyway, before Clark could step back, and caught him by the nape of the neck. Clark let himself be stopped, and when Bruce kissed him on the cheekbone, on the jaw, a smile dimpled Clark's cheek. He put his fingers over Bruce's mouth, but made no move to push him away.

It had all taken under a minute, and Bruce had to wait only a few more seconds like this, with his hand on Clark's neck and Clark's warm breath chasing the night's chill off Bruce's face at intervals, before Clark stirred and took a half-step back.

"The truck will be here in five minutes," he said. "Does that mean anything to you?"

They were still in arm's length of each other, but there was real space between their bodies again now. An ignoble curiosity made Bruce glance down. If Clark had had an erection earlier, it was gone now. Bruce would have liked to say the same, but he was still being pinched viciously by the cup on his suit, and he still wanted Clark so very badly.

"It does," he said. "Did you catch any names over the phone?"

"Nope. Sorry. What's going on here, Bruce?" 

"Illegal dumping."

"I think we have to be formally dating before dumping regulations apply."

Bruce looked at Clark in silence until Clark began to look sheepish.

"This was a slaughterhouse a century and a half ago," Bruce went on, satisfied. "Some vandals ripped out the floor and discovered it still has a drain that empties into the bay. Dumping into the sewers gets you caught. Dumping off the docks is difficult and gets you caught — _by me_. So someone is running a little business here, taking other people's waste and putting it in the water table. I'd like to know who's in charge and I'd like a look at their ledger."

"Who's the owner?"

"The city. The property's condemned."

Clark grimaced. He'd recently gone his first round with this phenomenon, courtesy one of Metropolis' few abandoned buildings. By contrast, Gotham was an eminent domain Swiss cheese, and ownership was often an investigative dead end. It had been entertaining to watch someone else suffer through it, for a change.

"The rest of my night will be getting over there and taking photos, then chasing this truck back to wherever it came from." Bruce had never taken his hand from the back of Clark's neck. He moved his thumb, and it slipped into the hollow behind Clark's ear. A muscle shifted in Clark's jaw. "It's below your pay grade," Bruce said.

"Mind if I stick around anyway?"

Bruce almost laughed. The two of them, trying to give each other outs. "Fine," he said instead.

Clark's smile was brilliant in the midnight dark. "Can I offer you a lift?"

"Absolutely not." Some thread of romanticism not yet purged from Bruce's personality told him to kiss Clark again before letting him go. Bruce suppressed it and pulled away at last. He moved his microphone and binoculars from the top of the parapet to a shadowy spot at the base, where he could collect them from later.

Clark remained where he was. "It just seems fair," he said, "after—"

"Don't push your luck."

This did nothing to quell Clark's amusement. Bruce unholstered his grapnel gun and vaulted the parapet; Clark floated after him.

* * *

The beep of a truck in reverse announced the arrival of tonight's load of toxic waste. The three goons in the warehouse were hastily packing up their chairs and table, but at this sound, one of them broke off to crank open a loading bay door and let the truck in. The other two folded the last of the furniture away in their panel van and began pulling on safety gear. They all moved with precisely the enthusiasm of people who had wasted most of their night waiting for something, then had to rush their last hand of poker when the thing in question finally showed up on short notice.

Bruce watched them through the lens of his camera, from a fresh vantage on the sill of an empty windowframe. Clark hovered to his right, lounging against the brick facade of the warehouse as though there were something other than empty air beneath his feet. Bruce tried to look at him as little as possible, but there was no way to be in Clark's presence and not be alert to him at all times. That was probably true for everyone, not just Bruce.

Engine noise and diesel belchings filled the building. The one Clark had correctly identified as Gomez earlier clipped a pair of full-length rubber gloves together between the shoulderblades of the one who'd stayed at the van with her, whose first or last name must have been James. Gomez raised her voice to be heard over the vehicular cacophony.

"What're the odds on us getting a sorry-we-wasted-your-whole-night?"

Presumably-James snorted; Bruce couldn't hear it, but saw his shoulders move. "I'd put cash on a fuck-you-for-being-on-time." He pulled on a face mask, but let it hang at his chest; its eye splashguard scraped his chin. "Better idea. Last one who gets gunk on their clothes gets fifty bucks."

"Damn, Jimbo, haven't we taken enough of your money tonight?"

The third one seemed to be named Palmer. He paced the truck as it backed into the warehouse, come-hithering it along slowly until it reached the limit of the driveable floor, then gestured it to a halt. The engine cut out, and Palmer circled around to the truck's back gate.

Names were about all Bruce had gotten out of these three, in his hours of eavesdropping. They didn't share old jokes, didn't mention mutual friends, and reflected on past nights at their pursuit just enough for Bruce to gather that this crew was slowly expanding and Gomez was newest. Whatever they did when they weren't here, it wasn't with each other. This operation didn't seem to be part of a larger criminal enterprise, just some opportunist and three hirelings who could just about be trusted to throw away trash unsupervised.

Clark's hand touched Bruce's elbow, and Bruce jerked his eye away from the viewfinder of his camera. He checked his escape routes first, then Clark's face, only to find Clark staring avidly through the warehouse wall. It was hard to judge his lines of sight when there was a solid object in the way, but he seemed to be looking at the truck — and even here, deep in the shadow of an adjacent building, Bruce could see that Clark was fighting a grin.

He wasn't trying to warn Bruce of anything. He had just reached out to Bruce in excitement, because he'd seen something that amused him.

That was new.

Down below them, Palmer was unlatching the truck's back gate. Bruce would find out soon enough what Clark thought was so funny; he forced his attention back to the view through his camera. Clark's hand remained where it was, cupping Bruce's elbow.

The truck's gate rolled up with a _clang_. The harsh light of the van's headlamps spilled into its trailer. Gomez and Presumably-James had been walking toward it, but stopped in their tracks.

"Uh," James said. "Is the gunk farther in? I'm not digging through this."

Bruce cranked up the zoom on his camera. The inside of the truck was piled with cardboard boxes. Flat-panel monitors protruded from the open tops of a few, and heaped around them were computer towers and racks of dust-choked hard drives. It all looked five or ten years old.

The driver had emerged from the cab of the truck to join Palmer and the rest, conveniently exposing his face to Bruce's camera. "Gunk?" the driver said.

"The chemicals you brought for us to dump?" prompted Gomez, helpfully.

"It's parts of computers, not chemicals," the driver said in tones of strained patience, pointing into the trailer.

"Yeah, we see that," Presumably-James said. "What are you expecting us to do, put a bunch of computer screens down the fucking drain?"

He pointed at the floor. This warehouse had changed hands several times, and the marks of its grisly original function — the rows of hooks, the white tile — had been renovated away over the course of its previous lives, until it was nothing but four walls, a roof, and the bare minimum required HVAC equipment. But a little of the old slaughterhouse had persisted beneath the new floor, to be unearthed recently by an entrepreneur with a sledgehammer. Long grooves and square metal grates showed through the ruined concrete: drains so old they predated the idea that it might be preferable not to dump inconceivable quantities of blood and offal directly into the bay.

Through the hand that still held his elbow, Bruce felt Clark's silent laughter.

"I got no idea what you do with any of this stuff," the driver said, "I just want it out of my truck so I can call it a night. I'd help you unload, but my back's not so good."

"Well, that's dandy, because we aren't unloading anything," James said. "We don't store shit here. We wouldn't even keep the containers, if you had any. We do one thing here and it's pour gunk down that hole."

"That's ... real impressive," the driver said delicately. Gomez began to put one of her bulky, rubber-gloved hands over her face, then stopped herself. "But I've got a truckload of this crap, and it's got to go somewhere."

"It can't just go to a landfill?" said Gomez.

"No, there's mercury or something. You have to do something to all the hard drives and it takes forever."

"Sounds like you're taking this back where it came from, then."

"Not an option."

"Why not?"

Bruce would have loved to know the answer to that one himself, but the driver just shook his head. "I don't ask for those kind of details. Listen, I can sweeten the deal a little for you guys, out of my own pocket, if you just get this crap out of my truck."

"We start doing that," said Presumably-James, "and everyone's going to want it. Six months from now we're just garbagemen."

Palmer had been listening to all of this with his arms folded, frowning at the floor. "Well, isn't this a pickle," he said at last.

Various combinations of them swapped glances; then three of the four produced cell phones at almost the same moment, like gunslingers resolving a standoff. Gomez looked like she would have done it as well if her gloves had been able to fit in the pockets of her jeans. She wrestled the gloves off while Palmer and the driver got on the horn. Presumably-James appeared to be texting.

Bruce raised his eye from the viewfinder again for another look at Clark. Clark's head was cocked just a little, in a listening attitude; he nodded along with the phone conversations happening below them like a man overhearing faint music.

He had never let go of Bruce's elbow. His hand had been there long enough for the warmth of it to seep all the way through to the skin, the bones. Bruce had half-noticed this process as it transpired, but in the last minute or so Clark had begun to rub his thumb along the back of Bruce's arm, just above the elbow at issue. The barely-perceptible vibration of that movement drew all of Bruce's attention to his elbow, and to Clark's body heat slowly suffusing him, and to the fact that at this moment, Clark chose to be touching him.

To Bruce's human eyes, Clark was little more than a shadow, a faint gleam of blue and red in the dark. Just enough of the light from inside the warehouse touched him for Bruce to see the precise moment when a smile began to steal over his face.

Bruce cleared his throat. He took some more photos of the jumble of electronics in the truck. Presumably-James leaned up against the van, which provided Bruce with an angle on the screen of his phone; he wasn't texting at all, but playing Candy Crush, damn him. Bruce got a couple of shots of that anyway. Palmer and the driver were still on their phones. A resolution did not seem imminent. This ridiculous stalemate could not offer as much distraction as Bruce needed to forget Clark's smile, or the hand Bruce could both feel and not feel on his arm.

This was hardly the first time they'd touched as they worked, even after their interpersonal relationship had ceased to be based largely on making violent attempts on each other's lives. They'd never been as distant as Bruce had expected; Clark had come back from death heartbreakingly willing to forgive, and they'd entered each other's orbits often. Often enough for Bruce to be almost accustomed to the occasional claps on the shoulder from Clark in the middle of a conversation, the taps on the arm or wrist to help Bruce orient on him in the dark.

It caught at Bruce's heart, every time — but this time, he didn't have to dread Clark finding out which other parts of Bruce reacted to these little touches, and he knew enough now to wonder if, all along, Clark had been doing this and wishing Bruce would touch him back.

There wasn't anything new to photograph; merely holding a camera only required one hand. Bruce reached across his body and put his hand over Clark's. The stroking thumb went still. Bruce ran his own gloved thumb along the line where Clark's wrist disappeared into the sleeve of his suit, the limit of the bare skin Bruce's touch could reach.

He both felt and heard Clark's breath catch. His voice was soft and aching. "Bruce...."

Bruce recognized, before Clark had even launched into it, the sound of a bad idea he was going to go along with anyway.

"Is anything actionable happening right now?" said Clark.

It was a risk and, also, it required him to take his hand off Clark's, but Bruce reached up and turned off his voice modulator. It was designed for intimidation, not sotto voce conversation. "This is conspiracy to illegally dispose of hazardous materials," he said, in his own voice. "Maybe legally protected data, too. There's no mercury in hard drives, but these computers are obviously from a business, so if they contain customer data—"

"Conspiracy convictions are so rare in Gotham they might as well be mythological. It's _Gotham_."

"Oh, so you're the expert now."

"I think you underestimate how deep I got into local law when I had my sights set on taking down the Bat journalistically."

There were at least two very good reasons Bruce wished he hadn't found that sentence erotic.

Clark's grin may have been the third. He glanced up at the band of stars that shone down into the canyon between the warehouse and the building opposite, then pushed off the wall like a swimmer making a turn, and rose toward the sky.

He could have darted away in an instant if he had wanted to; Bruce had seen him break the sound barrier from a standing start. Instead, Clark ascended with such dreamy slowness that Bruce had time to clip his camera to his belt and grab for Clark's cape, then his boot. Clark ignored both. Bruce had to release him or be dragged bodily from his perch.

The handle of Bruce's grapnel gun hung at the end of its line, just above the window where he crouched; the hook was still engaged with a spar of the warehouse's roof. He had left it there on the off chance a quick retreat was necessary. The trio in the warehouse were unlikely to spot Bruce on his deeply shadowed windowsill, but Presumably-James' unearned big-man swagger said he was carrying a gun he didn't know how to use, and Bruce just preferred not to deal with that tonight.

His contingency planning had not included using it to chase Clark.

Bruce reached up for the grapnel handle, and kicked away from the sill just as he hit the retract trigger. Clark was six feet above him, but Bruce rose faster, and overtook him quickly. A sense memory stirred in Bruce, and he reached out again without thinking to catch Clark under the arms, as though he were any of the dozens of falling Gothamites who Bruce had caught in midair, on one night or another of his long career.

Clark didn't elude him this time. They swung toward the wall together, until Bruce stopped their arc with his extended foot; their capes billowed about them like a single vast sail. Clark didn't slip from Bruce's arm and away into the sky, either, when Bruce halted his ascent. They hung together instead, thirty feet from the ground and fifteen from the roof, in a shadowy place-between-places not intended to be occupied by any person, for any purpose. The crime failing to transpire just on the other side of the warehouse's wall seemed a long way away.

Their faces were not far apart, but Bruce could barely see Clark, just a sliver of moonlight along one cheekbone and a glint off a wide, surprised eye. In a sense Bruce could barely feel him, either; for all the solidity of the shape of him in Bruce's arm, Clark was still floating, and to Bruce his suit might as well have been filled with dandelion fluff, instead of superhuman musculature and the magnificent fury of the sun.

Bruce tried turning him about. Clark moved as weightlessly as a skillful dance partner, and let himself be pressed up against the brick facade of the building and held there, chest to chest and thigh to thigh. This was not the first time Bruce had internally compared the way the two of them moved together to dancing, and as always, close on the heels of that thought came the next: if they could learn to fight together with the confidence and precision of a couple on a ballroom floor, what would they be like in bed?

In the shadows here Bruce could not quite see Clark's face, but he could feel Clark's warm breath and follow it back to Clark's mouth.

Just before their lips met, Clark groaned. Bruce had done nothing to earn this; it must have been a sound of sheer anticipation, and the thought licked through Bruce like fire as they kissed. Clark clutched at the back of Bruce's cowl; his body arched in the narrow space between Bruce and the wall, and he drank at Bruce's mouth, the one part of Bruce that could properly feel Clark's fervor, like the last twenty minutes of light surveillance had been a desert of impossible size and parchedness.

Bruce ruefully recalled the instant, back on the roof, when he had thought he'd moved too quickly for Clark. And here he'd been wrong again: he had thought a little time might temper both of them, but no, they were just picking back up where they had left off. Clark ran his hands down Bruce's back, dragging at handfuls of cape, and even that, a sensation attenuated to almost nothing by almost a quarter inch of armor, sent such a pang of arousal through Bruce that he had to break away from Clark's mouth to hiss through his teeth; the cup on his suit was no more accommodating now than it had been earlier.

"Sorry, sorry," Clark breathed, and though he pulled Bruce back in by the chin at once and kissed him again, he really had seemed to find somewhere that one particle of restraint that existed between the two of them; his mouth was gentler now, as though he thought Bruce's reaction might have been because Clark, not Bruce's own engineering decisions, had hurt him.

The dual prospects of Clark being so impassioned he forgot his own strength, and of Clark being so impassioned he merely thought he had forgotten it, sent a slow shiver through Bruce. His skin prickled everywhere Clark could not touch him; his cock strained hopelessly against the confines of his groin protector. 

It reminded him sharply of wondering, earlier, if Clark were hard as well. Maybe it was too soon, but — damn it, would they ever kiss in a context that allowed Bruce a free hand? Even his feet were occupied, bracing him against the wall; Clark could stay up perfectly well without Bruce's arm looped around him, but that arm, sandwiched between Clark and the bricks at his back, also served to steady Bruce, and of course holding on to the handle of his grapnel gun was non-negotiable.

Well. He had his mouth, and he had his hips. His mouth was busy — Clark was still holding him by the chin, and very few things could have motivated Bruce to stop kissing him.

Clark's thighs parted for Bruce's knee. His other hand was still holding a fistful of cape at the small of Bruce's back, but it slipped down to Bruce's ass now; Clark clearly had a notion of where this was going. He let himself be hitched a little higher against the wall, and he gave an absolutely maddening wriggle, of a type that Bruce would not have guessed was in the vocabulary of a man of his dimensions.

He felt exactly the moment that he and Clark found just the right angle, the right friction. Clark communicated it with his whole body, at a scale Bruce could feel even through the infuriating barrier of his suit: a powerful tension and release, a gasp so deep it expanded his chest. He seemed to forget he had been kissing Bruce, and when Bruce thrust against him again, Clark's head jerked backward, knocking against the wall with a force that would have made Bruce call a halt to check for bleeding, with anyone else.

"God," Clark said under his breath, "I wasn't trying to —" but swallowed the rest of the sentence when Bruce ground him up against the wall again.

"You weren't trying to what?" he said into Clark's tense jaw, as Clark shook against him, with his head thrown back and his lip caught savagely between his teeth.

"I really just wanted to kiss you again," Clark gasped, "but God, don't stop."

Each thrust against Clark was as frustrating as it was satisfying. Bruce craved the motion itself so desperately that he fell forward into each new one like a man tripping helplessly down the stairs; he craved Clark's only mostly successful attempts to be silent, and the way Clark alternately clutched at and caressed his back and shoulders and ass, and the controlled power of Clark's answering thrusts. But the groin cup on Bruce's suit, which in the past had saved him from any number of boots and bullets, transmitted his contact with Clark only as diffuse, unfulfilling pressure.

Bruce was panting and, more remarkably, _Clark_ was panting, moving against Bruce with growing speed and urgency as he climbed toward orgasm. There was no such build for Bruce, only a kind of runner's high where the agony of his confined half-erection fused with the vicarious exhilaration of Clark's pleasure. His shoulder burned from supporting his whole weight at the end of his grapnel line; he found himself using it to pull himself upward a fraction at the apex of every thrust, trying once again to match Clark's power.

He could have stayed in that limbo of arousal and pain and vindicated desire forever; it felt like he did. He lost all track of time. He bit Clark's throat in resentment and sheer incoherent lust, and felt the vibrations of Clark's moan through his teeth.

Clark's head struck the wall again when he came, and this time Bruce felt a puff of brick dust on his face. He had a brief vision of the two of them simply destroying this building. It wouldn't even be the first time. Clark was more tense than convulsive in the throes of orgasm; his body was rigid and his breath came in quick shuddering gasps. He released Bruce, then pressed his balled fists against the backs of Bruce's shoulders, then released him again in a way that recalled that moment earlier when he had been afraid he'd hurt Bruce somehow. He was almost silent until the tension began to drain from him, and then he let out a long, deep, soft sound that reverberated through Bruce's chest. It ended in a little laugh.

Bruce's heart raced; he felt his pulse in his crotch, heard it in his ears. He made himself still along with Clark, though he had to clench his teeth against his animal brain's stupid urgings to just keep grinding against Clark until he reached some sort of satisfaction. There was a certain exasperated pleasure to feeling Clark wind down when Bruce himself not only had nothing to wind down from, but at that very moment was experiencing the painful consequences of trying to get fully wound up.

At least it reminded him that he had things to do tonight other than Clark, and that he could accomplish his goals with Clark in much more comfort and with much greater success as soon as he knocked out the other items on his agenda.

"Did they hear us?" Bruce's voice came out tight and shaky; he would've liked more time to compose himself.

Clark took a breath that seemed to go on a long time. Bruce felt but could not see him roll the back of his head against the wall.

Surely he could listen and kiss at the same time. _No_, Bruce told himself.

"Yes," Clark said finally, and Bruce experienced a split second of disorientation before Clark went on, "but they're distracted. Hang on, the older guy is getting a phone call...."

His breath had slowed to normal. He probably, damn him, looked unruffled, though in the dark Bruce could only speculate. He ran his hands down to Bruce's utility belt. Bruce bit back the little sound of frustrated longing that wanted to leap from him, and was about to — he didn't know; object? — when Clark lifted him slightly and all of Bruce's weight came off his straining shoulder. It forced a sound out of Bruce after all, an embarrassing gasp of relief.

Clark was gracious enough not to call attention to it. "The same caller from earlier is sending them to a shipping container where they can unload the truck. Something something good business, continued relationship, et cetera — you know how this goes, he's putting himself out a little so they won't badmouth him in the ... illegal dumping community?"

"Did you get a name for the caller?"

"Nothing like that, sorry. I did get directions." Clark paused, listening, then went on. "They're all going, because the guy driving the truck can't unload it himself. Jimbo doesn't like that." He paused again. "He _really_ doesn't like that."

"Do we need to intercede?"

"No, it's all verbal."

It was faintly audible to Bruce now, filtering out through the broken window where he'd recently perched.

"It's going to take them a little while to get on the road," Clark said. "They have to drive, and we can fly. We have a few minutes."

He had straightened up and was no longer lolling against the wall. The weight of his gaze on Bruce could have been no clearer even if Bruce had actually been able to see it. Bruce's pulse pounded uncomfortably in his groin.

"How long would it take to get you in and out of this?" said Clark. He had been speaking quietly, but his voice dropped lower now, and the combination of inquiry and speculation in it ran along Bruce's skin as thrillingly as fingers.

To his shame, he did the math. It wasn't necessarily a good thing that he wouldn't take long to come in this state, but it was a fact. The answer was the same either way.

"No. Afterward." Bruce swallowed, and wished he hadn't; Clark would hear it. "This is just going to be more of the same. You don't have to stay. You could meet me, later, at the cave — or if you don't have plans for tomorrow—"

"I don't," Clark said quickly. Bruce felt him freeze for an instant; then Clark gave a little laugh, almost inaudibly. "I guess we're past me making up innocent-sounding excuses. I like watching you work. I don't want to be anywhere else."

Bruce didn't bother to hope Clark would take his silence for anything other than a struggle to master himself. "Fine," he said, as though his heart were not overflowing. "Just don't do anything impulsive."

He hit the retract trigger on his grapnel, and kicked away from the wall with his arm still firmly around Clark. He wasn't sure who it was, himself or Clark, who bore the two of them to the roof. 

The Batmobile waited several streets away, and Clark didn't stop laughing to himself until they had reached it.

* * *

The tail led them to a dockside shipping yard. At that point, Bruce gave up and let Clark carry him to the top of one of the ship-to-shore cranes.

He had been adamant about making the drive himself, pacing the truck and van through the city on parallel streets. This was partly because being the one unenhanced human in the League meant a life of perpetual vigilance against superhumans deciding to carry him around like a sack of potatoes, and partly because it seemed like a good idea to not be touching Clark for a little while. Clark had made the trip by air, and just having him on comms had been difficult enough. Bruce was not entirely convinced that Clark hadn't been _trying_ to be distracting; his voice had assumed a silky, deep-chested warmth that Bruce attributed to either Clark's post-orgasmic state or a deliberate attack on Bruce's physical wellbeing.

"Stop," Bruce said, as Clark lifted him into the air. Their faces were perilously close to each other. Clark's arms were around Bruce; Bruce had automatically rested his hands on Clark's shoulders, which was a mistake, because it involved feeling Clark's shoulders. At least his suit continued to protect him from full knowledge of Clark's thighs and hips and chest.

"I'm not doing anything," Clark said.

"You know you are."

"This is the least sexy way I could think of to carry you other than dragging you by your cape."

"Fireman's carry."

Clark paused. "Bruce, have you ranked all the carries by sexiness?"

Bruce sighed.

"And you remember the rankings, just off the top of your head?"

"Stop."

Clark didn't press it, but he radiated amusement as he set them both down atop the crane's long horizontal boom — and, Bruce thought, not a little satisfaction. The latter was surely because of his own joke, and Bruce accomplished nothing by imagining Clark's afterglow might last this long.

He crouched at the end of the boom, where a railing overlooked the shipping yard. It lay below his feet like a scale model of a city built from colorful oblong blocks. Sodium lights lined its boulevards; the low moon threw rectangular shadows among its rudimentary skyscrapers. Night had not stopped the bustle here any more than in Gotham proper, but the crane Clark had chosen was unused at the moment. It overlooked a sparse neighborhood at the yard's outskirts, where the driver of the truck was backing it up toward the open doors of an empty container.

The van that had been parked inside the warehouse at the beginning of the evening pulled up just as Bruce arrived. Palmer and Gomez piled out, followed by Presumably-James, who projected sullen affront so clearly with his body language that Bruce could see it even before he zoomed in with his camera. Bruce took a few photos of the container and its surroundings, just so he could identify it again later.

Through his viewfinder, he saw Gomez slip a phone from her pocket. She raised it, flicked her thumb at the screen twice, then pocketed it again in the same offhand fashion. 

Hmm. The screen of her phone was dim throughout this process. Bruce doubted she was reading a text; she might have been photographing the container's identification number. She jogged over to the truck when Palmer raised its back gate, and climbed up to begin ferrying the heaps of dusty electronics inside down to their temporary home.

Clark had come up behind Bruce and was crouched at his side, chin resting on fist. The moon above them and the yellow lamps of the container yard below let Bruce really see him for the first time tonight, not just infer his outline in the shadows or reconstruct his features from a pale sketch. He looked like a Rodin: a figure from mythology or the unconscious, rendered with such shocking detail and sensuality that the onlooker might almost convince himself it could come alive. Light returned the deep reds and blues that night stole from him.

It astounded Bruce that Clark seemed not to realize how provocative his Kryptonian getup was. He was essentially naked. Bruce could count the muscle groups in his thighs. The suit left exactly one thing to the imagination. Even to Bruce's, come to think. He still had not ascertained whether Clark's erections could be seen or felt through his suit.

Clark stirred, and his eyebrows rose. Bruce looked down automatically, but nothing much had changed at the shipping container. The trio from the warehouse were fire-brigading the contents of the truck out onto the pavement, while the driver sat in the truck's cab and watched them skeptically in his rear view mirror.

"Something on your mind?" said Clark.

Oh. This wasn't about the case at all. Bruce prepared to direct a glare at Clark, who knew perfectly well what was on Bruce's mind and why — but when he raised his eyes again, he found that Clark's face had colored. He was giving the cuticle of one of his thumbnails a close inspection. Oh.

Even two hundred feet in the air, unobserved, it was dangerous for them to use their civilian names while they worked. "Kal," Bruce said instead.

Clark started; his gaze flashed up to Bruce's face, and he began to smile. Bruce seldom called him by this name, and in light of recent developments, he supposed the reason would emerge soon enough: because Clark smiled like this when he did, joyful and disbelieving, and Bruce had not trusted himself to look at that smile and not give away something that he had assumed would strain their working relationship.

When he had a moment, Bruce was going to make a thorough accounting of all the things he should have recognized, and maybe would have if he hadn't been so busy protecting his own secret. _After all_, Clark had said when this all began. How much time had they wasted?

"Is the invitation to your place tomorrow still open?" said Clark.

Bruce searched too long for an answer that wouldn't sound either inadequate or desperate. "Yes." He suppressed a grimace.

"Would you consider getting lunch with me?"

He said it with such caution and hope that it robbed Bruce of speech. He had played his hand absolutely wrong tonight, if Clark thought the answer to this question might be no.

The silence soured Clark's expression. "Okay," he began, "well, that's f—"

He cut off at once when Bruce reached out and took him by the forearm. It was like a switch flipping in Clark's expression: defensive one moment, sheepish the next. The tension went out of his shoulders.

"Things went quickly tonight," Bruce said. He had a hundred failed interpersonal relationships, a thousand moments scarred into his memory when he should have said anything other than what he said — but there was one area where he succeeded reliably. He knew how to say just enough to extract the thing someone wanted to say anyway.

"I had this whole plan," Clark said, looking at Bruce's hand where it lay like a soot-mark on his gleaming forearm. "Interplanetary travel gives you so much time to overthink things. You were definitely going to let me kiss you by the end of the year. I was ninety percent sure."

Bruce snorted. Clark smiled down at Bruce's hand, then put his own over it. He ran his bare thumb over Bruce's weighted knuckles and the plate that protected the back of Bruce's hand. 

Things were starting to feel warm and tight inside Bruce's suit. "What was the plan?" he said, with a dry mouth.

"Oh, God," Clark said. "Well, you saw the beginning of it."

"I thought that was the entire thing."

Clark rolled his eyes. "You aren't the only person on the League who's played chess, Bruce," he said, then spotted the slant of Bruce's mouth and gave him a goodnatured glower. "Anyway, it gets considerably more embarrassing from there, so maybe we both dodged a bullet."

"Try me."

"This seems like something you should be asking me on my deathbed."

"It's a little late for that," Bruce said, which earned him a chuckle.

"All right," Clark said. "Well. It's come to my attention that when I don't have to worry about our secret identities or not embarrassing myself in front of Arthur, I talk about you a ... lot. I don't know how this maps onto Hreohzde social structures, but one of their diplomats definitely noticed something. I turned down most of the gifts they offered me, but this one is for you."

Clark's suit had pockets. Bruce had ascertained neither their precise locations nor how they could be concealed so utterly in a skin-tight garment, but it was clear that Clark often carried a cell phone and other oddments on himself. He did something at his hip too quick for Bruce to analyze; then his hand came up holding a hoop of dark, glittering metal small enough to be concealed in Clark's palm. Beaded chains swung from it. Clark did something to it that made the central hoop spring into a new, lacier shape. Before Bruce could react, Clark had reached up and hung the hoop over the ear of Bruce's suit.

Bruce held very still. None of the chains were in his field of vision, but he had felt them rattle against his cowl as they settled into place.

Clark's face was meticulously serious. "You collect these and incorporate them into your new festival hat the next time you hit a personal landmark, but it's socially acceptable to wear them individually until that happens."

"Is that so."

"That's why I asked for a black one. Aehnrza offered me one in the House El colors at first." Clark gestured at his chest.

"Thank you for the additional detail."

"You were going to hate this, of course. I was going to take it back and/or catch it when you threw it in my face. Then I would go die of mortification quietly by myself, but the seed would be planted."

"Is that so," Bruce repeated.

"Look, you asked." Clark's smile had turned nervous again. "I hadn't seen you in weeks and I — it should be noted, had been holding my breath for most of that time. I wanted things in the open. You were going to need a way to defuse it. I had prepared myself carefully for the fact that you weren't just going to leap into my arms." He reached for the ear of Bruce's cowl again.

Bruce beat him to it. The little alien fascinator had come through reentry undamaged. There were designs, perhaps words in the Hreohzde language, cut into the metal circle and each flat bead. It was straightforward enough to collapse it from its lacy wireframe state back into a simple hoop.

It wasn't the first thing Clark had ever given him; Clark was diligent about birthdays and major holidays, and personalized his cards with apparent sincerity. Bruce had been so taken aback by the first one — it had come in the _mail_, as though he hadn't just seen Clark the previous day — that he had sat turning it in his hands for half an hour, as though if he puzzled over it long enough it might reveal some deeper, secret meaning.

The not that much deeper, not actually very secret meaning had been that Clark had hoped Bruce's holiday season would be happy. Bruce had remade himself in Clark's honor, had tried to be gentler, more optimistic, more collaborative — to be worthy of both the Clark he had watched die and the Clark he had eventually gotten to know. Preposterously, against all expectation, the result of this was that Clark had come to like him as a person.

Clark's hand still hovered uncertainly between the two of them, ready to take back the trinket he had brought home, across the millions of silent miles between the planets, just to make fun of Bruce with.

"Sorry to disappoint," Bruce said, and put the gift in an empty compartment on his belt.

Clark all but glowed. "So we're on for lunch."

"We're on for whatever you want."

Bruce hadn't even been fishing. His camera had hung forgotten in his free hand throughout this conversation, and he was about to raise it for a check-in with their friends unloading the truck when Clark took him by the face and kissed him anyway. He felt Clark's smile against his mouth.

It was a twenty-foot tractor trailer, and it hadn't been sitting high on its wheels. They'd be at it for a while. Bruce hooked his camera back onto his belt, for now.

He'd cooled down considerably since the beginning of this conversation, and he assumed that the two of them were about to engage in a reasonable amount of kissing, then break off and return to the stakeout. The primary urgency was past. The edge was off for at least Clark, and perhaps more importantly, they had plans. All the frustrated desire of the moment could be deferred to a golden future in which Bruce had more to work with than few square inches of exposed skin on his face, and could actually feel the sex they were having.

This idea lasted until Bruce put his hand on Clark's side. He'd had a vague notion of pulling Clark in closer, of kissing him more deeply. Clark's breath caught; his whole body hitched with it. He drew back from Bruce a little, enough to look him in the eye. One of his hands still held Bruce's face, but the other dropped to Bruce's, and pressed it into Clark's side. There was something unexpectedly fierce in his expression.

Bruce took two things from this. First, he was a fool. Second, Clark was probably ticklish.

"You were pretty uncomfortable earlier, weren't you." Clark kneaded Bruce's hand. When he had stroked that same hand a few moments ago, what he had really been touching was the glove, the armor sandwiched between the layers of leather and mesh. His fingers dug in now, finding tendons, finding bones. Bruce had built these gloves to fight in, yes, but also to pick locks in; he felt the shape of Clark's fingers and the pressure of his touch more clearly on his hand than he could have anywhere else. "Sorry about that," Clark said.

A shiver progressed through Bruce slowly. Right, they were talking about the alley, not the way Clark was touching him. "I'm not, and I don't know why you would be," he said.

"Well, I don't usually think of myself as being selfish in bed," Clark said, pressing his thumb into the meat of Bruce's palm. Bruce's fingers flexed involuntarily, digging into Clark's side. He felt another ticklish flinch from Clark, and from himself, a first warning twinge. In a moment he'd be hard enough to wish he weren't. "Or ... any other location," Clark amended, in a voice that had become a little faint, a little distracted.

"I assure you, I was very much looking out for my own interests." Every ounce of Bruce's concentration not currently consumed by Clark went to keeping his voice level.

"That's great news," Clark murmured. One or the other of them had been leaning closer; their mouths were perilously close, until Clark glanced down at their joined hands. "Does this come off easily, or is it some sort of complicated—"

Bruce's pulse roared. The unforgiving cup on his suit sank its teeth into his groin. He hit the release that disabled the identity protection measures on his gauntlet — the taser, the gas, the sonic deterrent — and he undid a buckle. Clark had it the rest of the way off him a second later.

The night air's chill was a shock on Bruce's bare skin. He was no better prepared for the warmth of Clark's hand. Inside the suit he almost forgot about temperatures, about textures; he was floored by the ridges of Clark's fingers and the bite of his nails. Clark touched him with the fascination of a palmist, turning Bruce's hand in his own. Bruce followed the motion through until he had twisted right out of Clark's grasp — or until Clark released him, at least. Clark looked at Bruce quizzically, then went heavy-lidded when Bruce reached up to touch Clark's cheek.

It was so smooth he might have contrived to shave immediately before seeking Bruce out tonight. Bruce hadn't thought of it when their faces were actually touching, but he noticed it now, with his fingertips, with his own rough palm. Clark turned his face a little toward Bruce's hand — to kiss it, Bruce thought for a heart-clenching instant, but it seemed instead to be more like a sleeping man's unthinking movement toward a pleasant sensation. His lips parted when Bruce touched the curve of them; Bruce pressed his thumb against the corner of Clark's mouth and felt Clark's breath on his hand, soft as feathers.

Beneath his lowered lashes, his eyes never left Bruce's. The heat of his gaze mounted slowly, until Bruce half-expected to see the familiar veins of light under Clark's skin, to feel his own fingers scorch from touching him. This would be a good time to look down, if Bruce wanted an answer to his questions about how visible Clark's erections were in his suit.

He didn't, and not only out of reluctance to break eye contact. It wasn't an academic question. He wanted to learn not by seeing, but by running his bare hand down the plane of Clark's stomach until he _felt_ the answer; he wanted the experiential data of Clark coming against him nearly hard enough to break Bruce's arm.

Bruce inhaled sharply through his teeth. Crouching like this was doing him no favors; he shifted onto one knee and yanked foolishly at the leg of his suit with his still-gauntleted hand, as though that might give him some relief. It would not; there was no give in his suit. He had designed it like this, with nothing that would shift or bind in a fight. Bruce had no one to blame for his present state but himself. And, well. Clark.

Something pained passed over Clark's face, as though he had anything to suffer about at the moment. He glanced down at the shipping container, and Bruce glanced with him; the trio from the warehouse were taking a break themselves, lounging atop the heap of boxes in their dust-streaked clothing. None of them seemed to be in a hurry.

Clark put his hand on Bruce's chest and pushed him over. Bruce was already off balance, and landed just this side of too hard. It knocked the air out of him; he fought for a breath, then put one boot against the guardrail and shoved himself clear of it. Fifty feet behind him, the massive housing of the crane's engine hung above the boom. They'd be better concealed under there — but no, Clark was already throwing a leg over Bruce. This was happening here, now. Bruce couldn't imagine waiting.

He buried his naked fingers in Clark's hair and pulled him closer; Clark grabbed handfuls of Bruce's cape and yanked him up until he was half-sitting; their mouths met in the middle. Clark could have laid himself full-length against Bruce's body instead of kneeling nearly upright above him, but at least he was kissing Bruce lavishly. Bruce hardly spared it a thought except to try to pull Clark closer to him, until Clark flicked his own cape out of the way and reached behind himself to stroke Bruce's thighs.

Bruce jackknifed beneath Clark. He couldn't see what was happening and he could barely feel it; he had to infer from Clark's posture, and from the faint suggestions of pressure. That was Clark's open palm, he thought, along the top of Bruce's left thigh. Those were Clark's knuckles along the inside of the right.

He tapped sharply at Bruce's groin cup. Bruce lost purchase on Clark and collapsed on his back; the walkway rang beneath him. Bad idea or not, Bruce thrust up toward this minimal sensation as though it could alleviate the terrible ache of his trapped cock. A nudge suggested Clark had caressed Bruce with the flat of his hand, maybe run his thumb down the front of the cup — and then he drummed his nails on Bruce, a rat-tat-tat-tat that hurt more than it satisfied, and left Bruce both dreading and desperate for more.

Clark was watching him with the same half-closed eyes and soft, parted lips he'd had earlier. It hadn't looked like a plotting expression, but now Bruce wondered, with what little presence of mind he had.

He was braced on his elbows, as though his futile attempts to fuck Clark's hand with a partial erection, through layers of kevlar and carbon fiber, might somehow benefit from the leverage. The one thing this actually accomplished was putting him eye level with the obvious outline of Clark's hard cock, slanting toward his right hip under his suit. Bruce took a certain antagonistic satisfaction in the full-body jerk Clark gave when Bruce ran his thumb along it, but Clark gasped Bruce's name, and hearing the crack in his voice burned off everything but sheer desire.

So many of Bruce's questions were answered. The suit clung to Clark so tightly that Bruce could see him twitch through it; he thought he saw the prominent lip of Clark's glans as well, and he certainly felt it with his bare fingers when he pressed where it should be. And Clark felt him, through whatever tough, giving material made up his suit. His body buckled above Bruce, and his voice shook.

Either they had the same thought at the same time, or Clark had some other reason that Bruce would never know about for dragging one of his knees forward along the walkway beneath them. Bruce cupped Clark's ass with both hands, bare and gloved, and pulled him in until he could put his mouth to the outline of Clark's cock. He felt its shape with his lips, touched its heat with his tongue, and it pulsed like an answer to the agonized throbbing of Bruce's own.

One of Clark's hands brushed shakily against Bruce's face. He kissed it unthinkingly; his hips thrust at empty air. His desires were a scorching, unfulfillable jumble in his mind, so close and so far, laced with pain.

Clark bunched his fingertips together and pressed them to his hip. He dug them in, and the fabric split around them, then peeled stretchily away. Bruce experienced a moment of insight into the mystery of Clark's invisible pockets so cathartic he could barely distinguish it from arousal. Beneath the suit, Clark was wearing cotton briefs, because of course he was; he pulled the waistband down with his thumb, and Bruce saw his cock at last, smooth and flushed, trembling with his heartbeat.

And clean. Either Clark's suit had some self-cleaning functionality, or he had stopped somewhere during the half-hour drive to the container yard to get spruced up, with such speed that Bruce had noticed nothing. Bruce didn't think he liked either possibility.

What he did like was the way Clark took his own cock in his hand and pushed it into Bruce's mouth. It was probably the rudest thing Clark had done to Bruce since they had reconciled with each other; Bruce would have happily undergone it again at once, for the pleasant shock of Clark forcing his lips apart and his jaw wider, and the devastated noise Clark made as he did it. He sounded exactly like a man utterly robbed of his good manners.

Clark didn't have to be encouraged to fuck his mouth. Bruce doubted it was even a conscious decision. He just did it, because Bruce's mouth was around him and because composure and restraint were distant memories for both of them. Clark's thrusts were shallow — out of some vestige of politeness, Bruce thought at first, until Clark tipped Bruce's head back a little and pulled out until his cock slipped fully from Bruce's mouth. Bruce watched Clark watch the head press against his lips and then between them, and felt a tremor work its way through Clark. On his next thrust, he bumped the back of Bruce's throat, probably by accident; on the one after that, Bruce leaned into it and took Clark in all the way down to the base of his cock. Clark all but sobbed.

Bruce had half forgotten his own body. He could endure anything, even arousal so profound his whole being throbbed with it, even the agony of an erection he could not have. They had become the same thing; they had blended with the feel and taste of Clark, the sounds he was making, until the boundaries of frustration and satisfaction met each other and dissolved. Orgasm was a dream Bruce had had once.

He entirely lost track of what Clark's right hand was doing, until Clark reached behind himself with it and squeezed the Batsuit's cup so hard that Bruce felt it with excruciating clarity.

Bruce convulsed. He would have cried out if Clark hadn't been buried in his throat. He thought he bit down. Clark must not have been bothered, or he wouldn't have done it again at once. Bruce's hips seemed to find it a reasonable idea to try to fuck Clark's hand, and Clark replied with more pressure, so much harder than Bruce had been able to apply to him earlier, in the alley. Nothing should have been able to reach Bruce through the cup, but it hadn't been built to withstand a handjob from the strongest man on Earth.

There was still no hope of getting fully hard, but the thought of his cock sliding as freely and slickly through Clark's fingers as Clark's slid into his mouth burned in Bruce's mind like a brand. He ground up into the heel of Clark's palm and Clark pressed back, then cut the sound of Bruce's reaction short with another thrust of his hips. Bruce scraped mercilessly at Clark's cock with his teeth as it passed between them, but Clark only shuddered and fucked Bruce's mouth harder. He ran his hands along Clark's thighs and up his stomach, digging in too hard with his nails, pulling at him as though there were more of him that could be in Bruce's mouth.

His ungloved hand slipped high enough to touch the base of Clark's throat. Bruce felt the hollow of it flex, and hooked his fingers into Clark's collar just for purchase, until Clark reached up and pulled Bruce's hand away. Trepidation curled Bruce's fingers, but Clark uncurled them with his thumb and kissed the heel of Bruce's palm with a gentleness very much at odds with the brutal dialogue currently playing out between Bruce's cock and Clark's other hand.

Clark was panting; Bruce had known, but he could feel it now, quick and hot against his palm. He kissed Bruce's thumb and the bases of his fingers, ran his open mouth up to Bruce's fingertips and licked them with a delicacy that made Bruce shiver. He bit the web between Bruce's thumb and forefinger, just hard enough for Bruce to feel his teeth.

Bruce couldn't take it. He slipped his fingers between Clark's lips and fucked his sweet, inviting mouth with them. It was painfully insufficient, but he had no idea what wouldn't be, what amount of Clark could possibly be enough when they could scarcely touch each other. Bruce dug the fingers of his gloved hand into Clark's ass to drive Clark back into his mouth, sucked the head of Clark's cock fiercely when it retreated from his throat again. He wanted every act two bodies could perform together but he could have almost none of them, not tonight; he couldn't even come.

But Clark could. His cock spasmed in Bruce's throat with superhuman force, almost enough to gag him. Clark's whole body moved in jerks — hands, hips, thighs, uncoordinated and half-restrained. His teeth closed on Bruce's fingers for a perilous instant, then released them. He moaned at the bottom of each exhalation, again and again. His hand shook as he took Bruce by the ear of his cowl and pulled him off; Bruce licked the bitter head of Clark's cock as it emerged, kissed it, and the rest of Clark shook as well.

"Situation report." Even through the modulator, Bruce's voice was a wreck. Clark gave him a look that strongly implied the two of them did not share a language. "What's happening on the ground," Bruce tried.

When Clark turned his head to listen, the moon ran its fingers jealously along his jaw and neck. He fumbled with the waistband of his briefs. Bruce noticed for the first time that the rent Clark had torn in his suit was trying to seal.

"They're wrapping up." Clark's voice was deep and breathy, and Bruce could _feel_ it, because Clark was essentially sitting on him.

"Shit." Bruce tried to figure out how to push Clark off without touching him anywhere that would make Bruce think about either of their bodies, which was anywhere at all; he must have conveyed his intention well enough, because Clark swayed to his feet and helped Bruce up by the forearms. It would do.

"Older guy's driving Jimbo home," Clark was saying. He pressed the edges of the tear in his suit together. It vanished; his erection had not, yet. "Gomez is saying something about walking to a pizza place. Truck driver is pulling away. I can follow the truck." His weight shifted forward onto his toes, in a way Bruce had seen any number of times now, before any number of takeoffs.

"Wait," Bruce said, seizing him by the shoulder.

The look Clark gave him felt like stepping into a blast furnace. He touched Bruce's chest, and the stab of arousal almost doubled Bruce over. "They aren't exactly fleeing the scene in a hurry. Do you want—"

"Fuck," Bruce said. Everything below his neck was convinced he was going to die if he stayed inside this suit another second. Clark had a mouth and a powerful sense of fair play. Surely— "Stop. No. I need to talk to Gomez. Don't fly off, I—" He didn't finish the sentence. He had no justification other than wanting Clark with him tonight. He could follow up on the driver some other way.

Vaulting off the crane seemed like a good way to exit this conversation, but the cool shock of the metal railing against his palm brought him up short. He'd nearly forgotten his fucking gauntlet. He turned from the rail to find Clark behind him, retrieving it from twenty feet up the walkway. Bruce was lucky they hadn't knocked it off the crane altogether, in the ruckus.

Clark offered him the open end. Bruce reached out to slip his hand into it and saw, for the first time, how much he was shaking. No question about whether Clark had noticed. His expression was more concerned than heated as he snugged the gauntlet onto Bruce's hand.

"Are you all right?"

"Fine," Bruce said, as easily as he could. He yanked the buckles on his gauntlet tight, then reactivated the removal countermeasures.

Clark hadn't let go, which meant, in practical terms, that he was now holding Bruce by the hand. His mouth flattened skeptically. He made a habit of this sort of question, but Bruce didn't know why, if he was going to reject the answer every time.

"In that case, this is for my sake only," Clark said, closing in a step. Bruce expected a parting kiss, but Clark put his arms around Bruce instead.

Arousal ran new claws through Bruce. For a moment he was rigid in Clark's embrace. His whole body throbbed; the urgency of his imprisoned half-erection crept out to fill every corner of his suit. But he'd experienced Clark trying to draw him out, and this wasn't that. He was just holding Bruce. This was just a hug.

Bruce touched Clark's hair tentatively. When he cupped the back of Clark's head, Clark sighed into his shoulder and leaned in closer. That would do. Bruce tucked his face into Clark's warm, bare neck. Of course Clark would be a cuddler.

Clark moved his chin up to Bruce's shoulder so that he could speak unmuffled. "Why talk to Gomez?"

"I think she's undercover."

"Oh," Clark said. "That would explain why she has three phones."

Bruce pulled back sharply and looked him in the eye. "When were you going to mention this?"

"If I brought it up every time someone had an extra phone, we'd never talk about anything else." Clark didn't seem even slightly repentant. "Lots of people have burners."

"Half of the people you know are investigative journalists and the other half are vigilantes. Of course they have burners."

"_Also_, I've been preoccupied for most of the, what, two hours I've been back on Earth."

"Two hours," Bruce muttered. "Jesus."

"It's been wild." Clark rose onto his toes until his forehead touched Bruce's. "So, what I'm hearing is, you're fine," he said, in a voice so soft it felt like it must barely bridge the short distance between their mouths.

"I'm fine," Bruce said automatically. If Clark accepted it, it would be a first. But tonight had been a night of firsts, for the two of them as a unit and for, Bruce suspected, for Clark himself. He didn't strike Bruce as a man whose sexual modus operandi usually included tormenting his partners—

Oh. And Bruce had fled back into work as quickly as he could, in the alley earlier and then again, here. That could certainly look like ambivalence. Oh.

Bruce put his hand on Clark's cheek and felt, glove notwithstanding, the tension in his jaw and the set of his neck. "I'm fine for now," he said. "_Please_ come home with me tonight."

This time, Clark believed it. He kissed Bruce quickly — Bruce felt more than saw Clark's smile — and, when Bruce stepped back from him, Clark floated up into the black sky. Down below, Gomez hurried through the broad streets of the container yard. Bruce drew his grapnel gun and leapt into the night.

* * *

He let Gomez hear his approach. Just a faint snap of cape, but a sound that was out of place here, at this hour. Gomez was dialing on a cheap flip phone, moving at just under a jog through a neighborhood where the containers stood in blank towers six or seven high. She searched the shadows behind herself for the source of the noise, and ran directly into Bruce's chest.

The burner spun from her hand. Bruce caught it in midair. While Gomez reeled back from their collision, Bruce ascended a single container that hunkered between taller stacks nearby. He put the phone to his ear.

"—there?" a familiar voice said from it. "Hello?"

"Gordon," Bruce said.

Gomez had regained her footing; she pursued him to the foot of the container he was crouched atop, and looked just about ready to pursue him straight up its corrugated metal face and take her phone back.

A long sigh issued from the phone. "Please leave my undercover officers alone," Jim said.

"Don't put them in the middle of my cases."

"_You're_ in the middle of _my_ case," Gomez said. "I was two weeks deep into this a month ago, when you were going to space for reasons that everyone has been creepily vague about. Give me my phone back."

"I'll have to get back to you," Bruce said to Jim. He snapped the phone shut and tossed it down to Gomez, who caught and pocketed it in one movement. "What do I call you?"

"You first," she said.

"Funny."

Her eyes narrowed. She'd had a long night. Dust and cobwebs clung to her long black ponytail, her leather jacket; the shipping yard's harsh yellow lights hollowed her features. 

Bruce watched her make up her mind.

"Renee Montoya," she said. "Just not too loud."

"We aren't observed. What's your story, Detective Montoya?"

Oh, she liked that. She schooled her face, but not before Bruce could read her. She was young: straight out of the academy and into this undercover operation before anyone could learn her face, if Bruce knew how Gotham PD operated. He doubted she was actually a detective yet, but emphasis on the _yet_.

"Well, stop me if you've heard this one," she said. "Stericycle over in the Tombs is a toxic waste processing plant with no equipment, no employees, and a lot of barrels of chemicals just sitting around. They've been doing this for about six years, getting paid to neutralize waste and then just sitting on it and pocketing the difference."

This was all news to Bruce. Tonight had been his first opportunity to follow the dumping at the warehouse back to a source, and whatever behind-the-scenes miscommunication had resulted in someone sending a load of electronics had foxed that ambition. He tapped the screen on the inside of his right forearm to life, and did a little supplementary reading while Montoya talked.

"We got a tip about some things not adding up at Stericycle. I couldn't get anything admissible there, but I did get a look at their books, which pointed toward Gill Santoro, who they've just been putting on their accounts for the last six months, like he's a business and not one guy running an illegal dumping operation out of an old warehouse." Montoya's voice fell into a rhythm, and she began to pace. Bruce recognized this; she was talking to herself as much as to him. Detective work was not a solitary art, and she'd been undercover for a while.

"Santoro works for the Gotham Land Bank — his job's allocating properties for redevelopment projects. He's been quietly moving the warehouse down lists and shifting it from one category to another for about a year, so nobody notices it's just sitting around empty. So, I get myself hired, of course. Santoro is definitely dumping for a bunch of outfits, all kinds of different stuff — I mean, as long as it's a liquid, anyway. But I can't get in a room with him. He's not hard to find if you already know his name, but officially, I don't even have a phone number for him. Palmer does all the talking."

"Sounds about right," Bruce said, and cut his screen.

Its faint illumination had given Montoya's eyes something to fix on; without it, he would be just another irregular dark shape in the shadows between containers, to her. When Bruce was silent for a moment, she strained up on her toes, squinting, and said, "Are you still— Oh my _God_."

Her search of the shadows must have revealed Clark, who had tucked himself into a corner somewhere behind Bruce before this conversation began. His presence had this effect on people.

"All right, what am I missing?" said Montoya. "How big is this really?"

"Oh, sorry," Clark said. He stepped up to the edge of the container rather than speak to her from darkness. "It's the size you think it is. This is just a social call. Nice to meet you."

"A social — no one's seen you since the space launch!" Montoya paused an instant, then added bewilderedly, "Nice to meet you too."

"That's why I'm in town." Clark's hand alighted on Bruce's shoulder. "Just catching up. Go on, I didn't mean to interrupt your conversation."

Montoya gave Bruce a wild-eyed look, like he was the sensible one out of the two capes she'd met tonight, and would understand how crazy it was that she had gone out for a night of undercover illegal dumping and ended up talking to Superman in a container yard. A true Gothamite.

"What happens if you get in a room with Santoro?" said Bruce, before this could stray even farther off track.

She sank back onto her heels and made a visible effort to drag her eyes off Clark. "If I can record something substantial, I can peel the whole thing open. That would give me Stericycle and at least four or five other companies who've used the warehouse. Successfully, with actual toxic waste. I guess you know that we're out here because there was some sort of communication failure tonight."

As he listened to her, Clark took his hand off Bruce's shoulder and folded his arms; only then, meeting Clark's quick bashful glance, did Bruce realize how he'd focused on Clark's hand, and that his attention might have seemed like disapproval rather than preoccupation.

Montoya's eyes flicked back and forth between them. Great, a sharp one. Bruce appreciated it when Jim hired good people, but not when they were aimed at him.

"I'll drive Santoro out of cover," Bruce said. "I'm counting on you to do the rest."

Montoya's chin rose and her face set, though her eyes wavered sideways again to Clark. "You got it."

Bruce fired his grapnel gun and ascended into deeper shadow. As he slipped away over the top of an adjacent stack of containers, he heard Clark say behind him, "Have a good night."

* * *

Gill Santoro was asleep in his bed like a good criminal.

Sometimes Bruce's watchful presence alone was enough to wake someone. The same people who would never think to glance at the window or rafter where he lurked when they were awake would swim uneasily into consciousness as he leaned over their beds, as though the sleeping mind were sensitive to the Bat in a way the wakeful one was not.

Santoro slept on, no matter how close Bruce crept or how much he hovered over the slumbering form. Well, it wasn't foolproof.

"This is the scariest thing I've ever seen you do," Clark stage-whispered over comms.

Bruce had made himself into a monster, an avatar of terror and shadow, but even he wasn't going to wake a person by laughing over their bed in the dark. He bit it back, then reached out and tapped Santoro's shoulder.

That did it. Santoro erupted from sleep. Bruce shoved him back onto the bed. He caught up with what was happening in a hurry. For an instant he froze, breathing with the quickness and terror of a captured bird; then he lunged for the glasses that lay on his nightstand. Bruce swatted them onto the floor.

Clark gave a surprised breath of laughter in his ear. Bruce had left Clark in the Batmobile a few houses down, but of course he could see everything. "God, you're like a mean cat."

Santoro's hands came up defensively. "I don't know anything, I don't know anything! It's not me, I don't know why you're here—"

But he _did_ immediately think Bruce was here to interrogate him. Always nice when a suspect was helpful right out of the gate like that. Bruce slapped a photograph down on the nightstand and switched on the bedside lamp. Santoro flinched from the sudden brilliance.

"I _will_ find the other barrels, Santoro," Bruce said, in the flat, inhuman tones of his voice modulator. 

The photo was of a blue industrial barrel with a spiky, probably fictitious logo on the side. Clark had found it for him online during the drive over, and Bruce had run off a glossy on the photo printer in the car. He was not convinced it wasn't from a video game, but it would do the job. Santoro squinted at it with watering eyes. He tried glancing up at Bruce, but Bruce had positioned himself where the head of the lamp would be between his face and Santoro's; there was nothing to see through the glare but an indistinct dark shape, and a glove splayed across the photo.

"I don't — I don't know what you're talking about...." Santoro's lies were already losing conviction.

"You have time to turn yourself in," Bruce snarled. "Answer to the authorities. In a day, I'll have traced the radio signature on this barrel back to the rest of the batch, and you'll answer to _me_." He crushed the photo in his fist.

"Radio signature?" said Santoro, in a quavering voice.

"Traced the radio signature," Clark echoed, dubiously.

Bruce was already halfway out the window. "The time to think about this was _before_ you started pouring dihydrogen oxide into a bay people fish out of, Santoro," he said. The handle of his grapnel gun hung, waiting for him, from the roof.

"_Bruce_," Clark said. He was still laughing when Bruce rappelled down off another roof three buildings over and slipped into the driver's seat of the Batmobile. Clark's hand was already extended; as soon as Bruce shut the door behind himself, Clark braced against it and leaned over from the passenger seat.

He hesitated when their faces were a few inches apart. For a moment he just looked at Bruce, from that short distance away, with a delight and tenderness that even the most hopeless depths of Bruce's imagination could not have conjured. Of course he had known that Clark was playful and kind and implacable, but speculating about how that would translate to _being with_ him had been a fool's game, too tempting and too painful. Of course, as they had become teammates and then partners and friends, Bruce had learned Clark's sense of humor right along with his foibles, and become accustomed, more or less, to the sound of his laugh and the sight of him in a good mood. And yet even in the ten minutes on either side of a solitary orgasm, the one context in which Bruce let himself be that much of a fool, he'd never thought he could make Clark this happy.

Bruce was so unprepared, and there was so much to lose. For a moment, the thought of tomorrow terrified him as much as it exhilarated him.

He must have caught his breath. Clark's eyes flicked down to his mouth. It had now been at least three seconds, and Bruce had hit his limit on waiting. He pushed himself up in his seat and kissed Clark.

Clark laughed as their mouths met. He kissed Bruce with the unhurried sweetness of a man who'd had two good orgasms tonight and had few expectations for the rest of the evening. His hand drifted from the door to Bruce's jaw; his thumb, cool from touching the metal, grazed the corner of Bruce's mouth.

Bruce struggled to meet Clark on the same terms. He wanted to. He wanted to kiss Clark lazily, like they were two people with all the time in the world. He found himself gripping Clark by the hair instead, pulling him closer over the console. Bruce's mouth was still sore from Clark fucking it; the bruises and scrapes woke to the texture of Clark's tongue, and heat rolled through Bruce. He felt the curve of Clark's bottom lip between his teeth and remembered slipping his fingers into Clark's mouth. When Clark pulled away, Bruce was already breathing fast.

"What's Santoro doing?" said Bruce, sagging against the back of his seat.

Clark glanced past Bruce, through the driver's side window and the intervening buildings. "He's, uh, having a panic attack. He looks like he's about to shred some papers." He had settled back into his own seat, but his arm rested on the console between them. If he just uncurled his hand, his fingers would brush Bruce's thigh.

"Good," Bruce said, watching Clark's hand as though for sudden moves. "If I end up needing to reconstruct those—"

"I'll help, of course."

Bruce closed his eyes. Not kissing Clark wasn't helping. He was so near, and so damned helpful. Someday soon, Bruce was going to figure out whether Clark’s suit would open as readily to a human touch as to a Kryptonian one. He still hadn't actually held Clark's cock in his hand—

"I'm getting some very mixed messages from you," Clark said.

Bruce exhaled. His eyes opened. Months ago, he'd made himself stop counting the times the two of them had sat side by side in this car, precisely this distance apart. Last time, it had been a yawning, uncrossable gulf. This time, he could reach across that space any time he let himself. Judging by Clark's avid eyes and the inviting set of his mouth, Bruce needed only worry about what parts of the car Clark would pulverize if he decided to climb on top of Bruce.

"I don't know what's unclear," Bruce said.

"If I told you this guy's clearly going to be shredding papers and making phone calls for at least twenty minutes, and there's time for us to figure out how to get you just far enough out of your suit to enjoy yourself, what would you say to that?"

Clark opted to move his arm after all, when he touched Bruce's thigh. He ran his fingertips along a seam, as though contemplating avenues of ingress into Bruce's suit. His hand moved so lightly that Bruce would not have known it was there if he hadn't been looking. He had some inkling now of how Clark's hands felt, on his skin or in his mouth; as long as he watched, he would know exactly which square inches of his skin should most keenly feel the outrage of being denied Clark's touch.

"I'd say you take a lot of unnecessary risks in the field," Bruce said, much more breathlessly than he had intended. He shifted in his seat, and caught himself angling his knees wider; there was a logical path for Clark's hand to take, and Bruce knew where it ended. His groin cup was starting to make itself known — but it would be so much crueler and more confining if Clark closed his hand around it again, and squeezed.

"This is exactly what I'm talking about, Bruce," Clark said. He applied his nails to the texture of Bruce's suit, just firmly enough to produce a faint kevlar snarl. Bruce shuddered down to his bones. "You kiss me like you're trying to eat me and then run clear to the other side of the city when I offer to do more to you than lick your hand. I'm starting to think that not getting off is the point."

The breath snagged in Bruce's throat. His pulse seemed thunderous, as though its echoes were trapped inside his suit with him.

Clark was beginning to smile, damn him. "Oh."

"This doesn't have to be a problem," Bruce said at once, then jerked in his seat when Clark dug his fingers into Bruce's thigh. The Batsuit distributed what should have been five sharp points of pressure into a single viselike squeeze. Bruce ground his teeth to stop himself from shoving his hips toward Clark's hand, clenched his fists around the door release and the gearshift to stop himself from yanking Clark into his lap.

"It isn’t," Clark said, with such frankness that Bruce half forgot his predicament for a moment. He took a second look at Clark's smile. It was not mocking, as Bruce had expected, nor politely tolerant, as Bruce had feared. It was a smile Bruce had seen any number of times now, a part of their partnership that perhaps had not been irrevocably altered by this night.

"Except that I have some things to rethink," Clark went on. His eyes never left Bruce’s face. "I wasted a lot of time tonight trying to figure out how to talk you into making your suit more roomy."

Clark's hand relaxed gradually. An inch away, Bruce suffered behind the barrier of his groin cup. A thin sliver of a moan escaped him when he unclenched his teeth to reply; he bit the inside of his mouth and checked their perimeter in one of the dash displays, as though someone might have crept up on them in the driveway of his vacationing family's two-storey and overheard him slowly losing it over quite literally nothing, over the non-sensation of being not-touched.

"I'm satisfied with the current dimensions of my suit," he said, with difficulty.

"And I guess I can stop worrying about how to apologize for getting carried away earlier," Clark said. He was kneading Bruce's thigh now, as though to remind Bruce that he could make himself felt through the cup the moment he chose to, as easily as he knocked down a wall or demolished the scaffoldings of Bruce's judgment.

"I have no problems with your conduct thus far tonight," Bruce gritted out.

Clark laughed. The vibration carried tantalizingly through Bruce's body. "_Thus far_, wow."

Bruce set his jaw and flashed Clark his most belligerent look, the one that would escalate a disagreement into an argument every time. It was seldom intentional, but that didn't mean Bruce couldn't feel himself doing it every time it happened.

This time, instead of picking a fight, Clark seized Bruce by the ear of his cowl and kissed him. Had this always been the subtext of the furrowed brow and clenched mouth with which Clark customarily replied to that look? There was no time to wonder: nothing lazy or undemanding remained from a few minutes ago, before Clark had launched this round of torment. He kissed Bruce with the same depth and fervor that Bruce had tried to hold back earlier, and Bruce, half hobbled by his own attempts at restraint and half stunned by lust, fumbled to keep up.

Clark's hand slipped downward from Bruce's cowl. Bruce knew its destination. He pulled back to watch it descend along his chest and stomach, over the Bat insignia, past his utility belt. He was openmouthed, panting, hands clenched in Clark's hair; each time Clark's hand grazed the insensate skin of his suit, he flinched as though he felt it.

In a way, he did. Clark had left him tender earlier, as every hopeless pulse of Bruce's cock reminded him. He would be feeling Clark's merciless grip for a week. He felt it again now, as Clark closed his hand over the groin protector of Bruce's suit with utmost care and gentleness, and Bruce surged incorrigibly beneath it. Dread and anticipation spiked in him like a fever. He let his head loll back against the driver's seat as though pinned there, and waited with his heart in his throat for Clark's hand to close.

"Santoro just started his car," Clark said.

Bruce's eyes snapped open. Guilty adrenaline flooded him, and immediately picked a fight with all the other chemicals that had been burgeoning through his body for most of the evening. He shook inside his suit; agony and need bit at him.

"He's meeting his Stericycle contact in the Tombs. We should get going." Clark was already back in his seat, bucking his damned seatbelt.

Bruce's immediate impulse was to yank his pants up. It wasn't as though he'd never been caught _in flagrante_ before; getting caught _in flagrante_ was a recurring element of his mission plans. But he'd never felt so caught out by the very person he had been trying to have sex _with_, and he'd never let himself become this distracted in the middle of a case. Also, by the strictest definition of the word, he wasn't wearing pants at all right now.

"Would you care to fill me in on what I missed?" he said, fumbling for the ignition.

"Santoro finished shredding his documents a while ago and got on the phone with that Palmer guy and then with someone from Stericycle." Clark could at least have had the decency to sound ruffled. "He wants all hands on deck, including 'Gomez', at the Stericycle toxic waste site so they can figure out which barrels incriminate them. Which is perfect. This is going really well."

He was right, but should have kept Bruce up to date, not distracted him and then dropped all of this on him out of the blue. Bruce ran the whole argument silently in his spinning head, and let it go. Clark almost certainly knew that, and they would have plenty of time to argue about it later regardless.

Bruce was making no progress on the ignition. He put his trembling hands on the wheel instead for the moment, closed his eyes, and took a long, slow breath. He catalogued the aches, the frustrations. The overwhelming urgency of his thwarted half-erection. The smell of Clark, eighteen inches from him. Even at rest, the Batmobile sat differently on its suspension with Clark in the passenger seat, and Bruce felt the difference as clearly as he would have felt a change to his own body.

He inventoried it all, and laid it aside for later.

In the brief silence of his own mind, a thought intruded.

"Clark," he said. "How much of this did you plan?"

Clark's face reddened, but his smile was unabashed. "Almost all of it."

No day had passed since Clark's resurrection that he had not floored Bruce with wonder, with his deeds, or his abilities, or his tolerance of and, eventually, fondness for Bruce. Bruce still might never have loved Clark more than at this moment.

The ignition turned in his hand, and the Batmobile roared back out onto the streets of Gotham.

* * *

The shakedown was already under way when Bruce reached the roof of Stericycle's "processing plant". It was just Santoro, for now. Through a broken skylight, Bruce watched him scrabble among the rusting barrels, examining each logo by the light of his phone. He'd come in a dress shirt and silk pajama bottoms, and he handled the barrels like he was afraid to touch them.

Palmer and Presumably-James pulled up in the van from earlier, bleary and disgruntled; "Gomez" rolled in last. Montoya had stopped for pizza at some point, and passed the box around while Santoro repeated his instructions for the others to her. Clark had settled in next to Bruce at the skylight, as silently as only a flying man could; the sight of Montoya chewing on her Veggie Supreme while Santoro hyperventilated his way through the explanation for this outing got the very faintest breath of a laugh out of him.

Next came a black town car that disgorged three large men in suits and a woman in track pants. The woman had bedhead and a thunderous expression. The men had the air of people whose job descriptions including not emoting, but looked crisp enough that Bruce doubted they had been hauled out of bed for this. This was a lot of muscle just to watch and/or participate in Santoro's midnight panic attack.

They held the big side doors for the woman, who blew into the building like a storm. "Sanford, you little weasel, I told you to stay the fuck out."

While all eyes were on the new arrival, Bruce set the hook of his grapnel in the edge of the skylight and lowered himself among the barrels.

It stank down here. Stericycle had given this old factory a fresh coat of paint when they bought it, but its insides were rotten. The barrels were in no better shape, judging by their sharp chemical reek. Even if he breathed through his mouth, Bruce could taste the heady mixture of black mold and carcinogens in the air.

Santoro was mounting a jittery defense of himself. "I think whether the Bat personally hangs us all by our heels outside City Hall takes just a little bit of precedence over whatever it is you don’t want me to find here. I’m only looking for one kind of barrel — look, I drew the logo—"

The woman from Stericycle tore Santoro’s sketch from his hand and ground it under her heel. "You moron, when has the Bat ever _warned someone_ he has _almost enough evidence_ to nail them? He’s using you, probably to get to me. Were you followed here?"

Santoro’s face went ashen. "I— No, not that I saw...."

Clark alighted next to Bruce with a grimace, and hunkered down with him behind the haphazard pile of barrels where he hid. Jamming into a hiding spot together was a familiar routine, but this time, neither of them made the effort to stop their knees from brushing. Bruce spotted a hint of a smile at the corner of Clark's mouth. Even in this dimness, he had to make himself stop looking. 

"Tell me _exactly_ what he said to you," the woman said, and listened with neither sympathy nor patience to Santoro’s disorganized account of his evening. Every new detail incensed her further. "Dihydrogen oxide," she said at one point, "Santoro, you _fucking idiot_." Clark put his hand over his mouth, and avoided Bruce's eye.

Her goons had arrayed themselves around her at parade rest, just out of the path of her pacing. Next to them, Santoro’s crew looked like the plucky underdogs in a sports film. Presumably-James, at about half their average size, tried to puff himself up to match; he was visibly at war with himself about whether to let his hands hover near his belt. Anyone in the room who hadn't been aware he was armed certainly knew it now. Palmer did a slightly better job of looking like a professional criminal, standing silently at Santoro's shoulder. Bruce suspected Palmer was the only member of Santoro's crew who had made his living at this for any real length of time.

"Great," she said. "Well, you've completely fucked me. I'm out of here. I don't want to ever see you again, but I'm not completely uninterested in that warehouse of yours. If you have some sort of tragic accident and one of your people takes over, they should give me a call. There's a bonus for saving me the time."

There was a brief frozen silence among Santoro's people. Montoya and Presumably-James met eyes for a moment; James' mouth gaped. The Stericycle liaison turned on her heel and stalked toward the door between her goons, who continued to give the appearance of watchful slabs of meat.

"You can't—" said Santoro, but he didn't have time to work up a proper outrage before Palmer lunged for James. He yanked the pistol from the back of James' waistband. It was a semiautomatic of much higher caliber than James had any use for, and it was pointed at Santoro's chest now.

Bruce, with his merely human reaction time, had to reconstruct what happened next at a fractional delay, and he fell farther behind as events piled up.

Clark half rose from his crouch behind the heap of barrels. Light veined the skin around his eyes; his irises sparked white. Palmer yelped, and the gun fell from his hand. Bruce had seen this trick before: Clark could cut or weld with his eyes, but his arsenal also included narrow, focused beams that he liked to use to make people drop their weapons. It was one of Bruce's favorite things about him.

The gun tumbled end over end to the disintegrating floor, and landed exactly wrong.

Bruce saw the very beginning of the muzzle flash. By the time he heard the report of the gun, he was airborne: Clark had seized him by the arm and thrown him straight up toward the exposed roof trusses.

Blue light bloomed below him. The bullet had struck one of the decaying barrels and its contents had burst into chemical fire. As quickly as the conflagration began, it was over; Bruce twisted in mid-flight and saw Clark inhaling the blaze, sucking down so much air that the room cooled and the dropping pressure made Bruce's ears pop.

Just at the weightless apex of Bruce's trajectory, a red-and-blue blur rocketed past him and out the skylight. He thought he saw Clark's cheeks bulging, and his hand over his mouth again.

Gravity caught up with Bruce; he rolled in its embrace until his feet were pointed at the floor, and fired his grapnel into the roof trusses to soften his landing. Each change of acceleration reached down to his bones, pulling and twisting at him — but none more powerfully than Clark had, when he'd thrown Bruce to safety. That was what Bruce had longed for and dreaded, back in the car: to feel Clark's full strength through the suit, to be touched by him without reservation, whatever it cost, however much it hurt.

He hurt now, just thinking about it. On this long, reprieveless night, it was like his cock never subsided, it just went into temporary abeyance until a stray thought or look or, God forbid, a touch of Clark's hand brought it throbbing back to life. This was not the time. Clark wasn't even here to enjoy his discomfort.

Bruce kicked a gun out of the hands of a Stericycle goon in midair, then landed on him hard enough to bear him to the floor. He tossed magnetic flashbangs at the other two goons and let those take care of their guns while he stopped their boss from legging it straight out the door with a bolas. Palmer was still clutching his burnt hand; Santoro and Presumably-James were both still covering their heads against the explosion. He'd take care of them in a moment.

Montoya met Bruce's eye. They were the only people in the building in full possession of their wits, for the moment. She gave him a nod, then pulled an extensible baton from her back pocket and snapped it open. Good. He would stage-punch her when she reached him, and with a little prosecutorial luck, she'd have her bust.

Bruce's only remaining problems were a painful half-erection and three to seven people to take his anger about it out on. He holstered his grapnel and got down to work.

* * *

The patrol cars turned up before Clark did. He also wasn't answering his comm; Bruce suspected the explosion had melted it, though he did also briefly entertain the idea that the culmination of this incredible night would be the discovery of a second substance that could kill Clark. Now that everyone was outside and in handcuffs he dropped back into the "processing plant" to look for a label on the barrel, but the explosion had obliterated any clue as to its contents.

Bruce had to stop this. Clark had just gotten sidetracked by a fire three states away, or a kitten in a tree. They'd catch up back at the cave. He fired his grapnel at the next building over; the Batmobile was just a couple of blocks away.

Powerful arms closed around him in midair. A sharp change of direction crushed him pleasantly against Clark's chest. Despite himself, Bruce moaned aloud. His body shifted gears back to sex so quickly that it dizzied him. The pain that woke once again in his groin was entirely contiguous with his arousal. He was no longer sure he recalled what it felt like to want Clark without that frustration and unease, and without the bite of the cup.

His grapnel was still anchored, still paying out line; he remembered to hit the release just before the distance would have yanked it out of his hand. His face and Clark's were inches apart. As they rose above Gotham together, Bruce caught a whiff of mint. His laugh surprised them both.

"What?" said Clark. They weren't flying fast enough for the wind to tear his voice away.

"You went home to brush your teeth."

"My mouth tasted like.... You know, the customary similes break down when you actually had toxic waste fire in your mouth."

"Personal worst?"

"_By far_. I don't know if anyone's ever tasted anything that bad and lived."

"I appreciate the consideration," Bruce said, and kissed him.

Clark's grip tightened. They were chest to chest again; Clark had held him like this when they ascended to the crane back at the shipping yard, while Bruce had struggled to focus on something other than Clark's body, his nearness, the unfamiliar thrill of being pressed full-length against him and knowing it tantalized them both in the same way. There were no such barriers this time, no case, no stakeout, just the two of them and the city and the sky. Bruce kissed Clark giddily, greedily, holding on with all four limbs. Clark's fingers dug into him, and Bruce shuddered; in the confines of his suit he felt half liquid, half flame.

A cloud enveloped them. Bruce had assumed they would be going to the cave, for reasons probably not unrelated to the fact that most of his sexual fantasies about Clark took place there. Clark's apartment would have done fine as well. Or any rooftop, frankly. Anywhere at all on Earth where a crime would not immediately demand their attention. 

They emerged from the cloud and into a glittering sky. Bruce relinquished Clark’s mouth for a moment to get the lay of the land. They’d drifted over the bay; Gotham and Metropolis were bright margins along either shore. All right, Clark’s apartment it was. Maybe he had ideas that only worked there. Bruce did too. Never mind his suit, he might leap out of his own skin from sheer anticipation.

He was looking back to Clark to ask him about it, to kiss him again, to urge him faster, when Clark let him go, and he fell. 

Bruce tumbled through starry darkness and then into the soft violet embrace of the cloud. His grapnel was useless here. His cape could slow his fall, but not enough; they had been thousands of feet up. He shouted into his comm, but Clark wasn't answering.

Clark. His outline appeared in the mist above Bruce. Bruce reached for him without thinking, and saw Clark’s arm extend to him in turn. Just a terrible mistake, the two of them trusting each other too much and relaxing their holds on each other at the same time. It was hard to keep purchase on Clark’s suit in a fight, let alone when Bruce was so preoccupied.

The space between them shrank until Bruce could see Clark’s calm, focused face, and shrank until he could hear the snap of Clark’s cape, and shrank until their outstretched hands were inches apart — and with that little span remaining, Bruce could see that, every second, the gap had shrunk more slowly, until the distance from his fingertips to Clark’s closed as gradually as though they were two ordinary men touching each other with reverent slowness in private, not a vigilante and an alien accelerating toward the flat dark mirror of the bay at thirty-two feet per second. 

Their fingertips touched, and all the fear left Bruce. Clark had never failed to catch him. He just didn’t usually make this much of a production of it, and Bruce didn’t understand what had changed until Clark’s hand closed around his, as gentle and firm as a handshake. He felt the first pull of gravity all through his body, and the moonlight showed him Clark’s smirk.

This bastard. So, he had been close enough to see or hear or smell Bruce's reaction to being thrown, earlier. He could have just said something.

Deceleration pulled at Bruce, stretched him. He grabbed for Clark’s hand with his own free one, but he wasn’t so concerned with not falling that he failed to appreciate Clark exerting his strength all along Bruce's body in this tug-of-war with physics. It had all the breathtaking intimacy and peril of being slammed full-length against a wall by him, and Bruce's whole body thrilled with it. Clark's eyes never left Bruce's face.

Bruce had worked up no little speed while freefalling. Clark bled it off so slowly that Bruce's boots just grazed the shining blackness of the bay as they came to a halt. Without the rush of air past his cowl, it was quiet enough for Bruce to hear his own fast breath. He let go of Clark with one hand to reach for his elbow — if he had to climb Clark's arm to kiss him again, that was what he would do — but Clark reversed in midair, pivoting around the fulcrum of their joined hands. He shot upward a hundred feet, fast enough for the wind to steal the air from Bruce's lungs. Bruce swung wide at the end of Clark's arm; at the apex of the arc, Clark loosed him into the sky again.

This time, he flew. He might not have had Clark's Kryptonian advantages, but it wasn't as though Bruce was a stranger to skydiving. He tumbled feet over cowl at first, but by the time Clark caught up with him again, Bruce had control of his spin — control enough to grant him the luxury of watching Clark's approach. He'd wondered at the spectacle of Clark in flight any number of times, but never like this, airborne but with no glass between them, no roar of the engine of one of Bruce's planes, no disaster-in-progress that would need their full attention again as soon as Clark saved Bruce from his fall. He reached down, and waited for Clark to rise into his arms.

Clark slowed again as he overtook Bruce. They were flying fast enough for the wind to scour the exposed part of Bruce's face, but when he reached out to Bruce at last, he was creeping up on Bruce by inches. He touched Bruce's knee first, not his outstretched hand; he ran his bare palm up Bruce's armored thigh, glanced at Bruce's face from beneath his lashes, then leaned in and kissed Bruce's hip.

Bruce couldn't hear his own groan, but he was sure Clark could. He ached and shivered inside his suit. His imagination conjured the contrast that the heat of Clark's mouth would make against the night air's chill, if only he could feel either. He considered seizing Clark's head and urging it toward his groin, just to see what Clark would look like with his mouth there — or even for the sensation of Clark sinking his teeth into Bruce's cup, the vicious pressure he had looked forward to back in the car and been denied by a combination of timing and Clark's diabolical sense of fun.

Clark kissed the buckle of Bruce's utility belt, which was essentially as good. He worked his way up Bruce's body like he was crawling on top of him in bed, not catching up to him in midair, two hundred feet above open water. His hands trailed over Bruce's ass and up his sides; his mouth traveled kiss by kiss up Bruce's chest. Bruce eventually took Clark by the cape and yanked him closer until he was near enough to kiss Clark's mouth, his jaw, his throat. Clark chuckled, then groaned.

The momentum of Clark's throw had given up the ghost, but Clark, unbeholden to the laws of physics, was still rising beneath Bruce. Bruce's full weight settled onto Clark — and then more than Bruce's full weight, as the g-force of Clark's ascension pressed their bodies together like a massive, gentle hand.

One of Clark's thighs slipped between his, and Bruce ground against it desperately. It had been hours now. Bruce knew better than to expect anything while he was wearing the suit, but _it had been hours_ of furious arousal and teasing and the rebukes of both circumstance and Bruce's own damn engineering. What he should do now was make Clark come again, savor the sight of it happening in midair, hope he didn't die in the process, and worry about himself later, perhaps in a context wherein he could both have a full erection and actually touch it. But the suit meant nothing to the great pushings and pullings of acceleration and gravity; against them, Bruce might as well have been naked, and with them, Clark could touch every part of him with impunity.

His breath was fast, and he held on to Clark with shaking hands. The suit's cup still tormented him with pain and denied him the friction he sought against Clark's hip, but he thought he might be getting close anyway.

They were still rising — rising faster, squeezed together ever more tightly by it. Clark put on a final burst of speed and, with his hands on Bruce's sides, pushed him into the night sky like a dancer casting his partner into the air. Bruce clawed at empty space, but Clark was already out of reach, looping away from him into the night.

It was at least a pleasure to watch him. Bruce had no intuitive sense of what it was like to fly the way Clark did, and in this one area, Clark's descriptive powers seemed to fail him. Watching him haul great weights through the sky and feeling the eddies he sometimes left in the air at takeoff had given Bruce the impression that Clark did not merely think himself in a direction, but was powerfully exerting some Kryptonian faculty humans lacked, and that the apparent ease with which he rolled in midair as he curved back toward Bruce was just Clark having an Olympic swimmer's knack for making something hard look effortless.

Bruce had passed the apex of this throw and was falling headfirst toward the black water a thousand or more feet below. Clark converged with him again, arcing in upside-down and slowing, slowing, until he was close enough to reach out and touch Bruce's face.

His thumb followed the curve of Bruce's bottom lip. Bruce kissed it, then seized the edges of his own cape, kicked in midair, and shot away from him at an angle.

Behind and below him, Clark laughed. He caught up in just a moment, and this time simply grabbed Bruce by the boot. Bruce tried shaking him off, just to see what would happen. Clark jerked him closer by his captured foot; it sent such a wrenching pleasure, such a throb of desire through Bruce that he was in no state for further sport when Clark went for his belt and yanked Bruce into his arms.

Their bodies collided hard. Clark's mouth was waiting for Bruce when he sought it; Bruce kissed him urgently, biting harder at Clark's lips than he had meant to. They spiraled together through the night sky, and each change of trajectory pulled at Bruce, kneaded him. He clung to Clark until he felt Clark trust his grip a little too much, then unhooked his legs, shoved himself away from Clark, and plummeted.

"Oh my God, Bruce," he heard faintly from above.

He didn't fall for long. Clark's arms closed around him in a few seconds — no teasing, no delicate touches from arm's length. No production of slowing Bruce to a comfortable speed before accelerating in a new direction, either: Clark wrested Bruce from his fall and bore him skyward with unapologetic quickness. Bruce would have moaned, but the same g-force that wrung at his limbs and squeezed his aching cock relentlessly against the confines of his groin cup had also pressed the air from his lungs.

He had thought Clark might call a halt after that stunt, but he kept rising into the night while Bruce shook and gasped in his arms. After these hours of frustration, Bruce's orgasm felt unthinkably huge and possible and _close_, a potential that thundered in every corner of his suit and mind with each heartbeat. Maybe all he needed was another aerial corkscrew, or for Clark to reach down between their bodies and finally touch him again. Or—

Clark put his hands on Bruce's sides. It wasn't a firm hold, and Bruce was at the moment so tremblingly disorganized that if Clark had not angled himself backward as he flew, Bruce might have slipped from Clark's arms when he put on the now-familiar burst of speed right before he thrust Bruce toward the stars.

Bruce flew upward alone for only a moment before Clark overtook him. He sailed past just inches away, with one hand outstretched toward Bruce. When Bruce reached up and took it, Clark pivoted in midair and tossed him even higher, even faster.

He jackknifed in empty air to get his spin under control, and looked for Clark again, for his intent face and extended hand. Bruce expected a dark silhouette against the stars, limned red and blue by the moon. He found Clark below him instead, floating more or less where he had been when he threw Bruce into the sky.

The apex of Bruce's arc was coming anyway. He waited for himself to slow, for the hesitant moment when he was neither rising nor falling, and finally for the beginning of the drop; then he organized his body, though it throbbed and shivered and rebelled, into its most aerodynamic shape, and knifed through the air toward Clark.

The role reversal didn't strike home until he saw Clark reach up toward him. In fact, Clark was falling too now, so that Bruce had to pursue him down through hundreds of feet of empty air before their fingertips grazed each other. Oh yes, Bruce remembered. He took Clark's hand, as gentle and firm as a handshake. Moonlight showed him the smile on Clark's upturned face.

Earth rushed toward them. Their two cities were cobwebs of light slowly resolving into districts and streets, on either side of a dark stroke of water. Clark's cape cut red-and-black shapes against the starry glitter of civilization and the sky's reflection in the bay. They arrowed into a low cloud and emerged a moment later, trailing shreds of mist. Bruce couldn't whittle their speed down to nothing the way that Clark had — he wasn't sure what Clark expected from him, really. If it were something specific, he probably would have just said it by now.

Which meant it was up to Bruce. Well, he could only look at Clark for so long without wanting to kiss him. He pulled Clark up toward himself.

Five hundred feet above the water, their mouths met. Clark gave up most of his speed in an instant, and Bruce's momentum slammed his body down against Clark's. It was like the cosmic yank of a parachute opening, like barreling through a brick wall in the Batmobile, like wrestling an angel. Clark's knee slipped between Bruce's thighs again, and the impact compressed his cock brutally inside its protective cup. He had just enough breath in his lungs to cry out when he came.

Clark curled his arms around Bruce protectively while his orgasm wracked him. It was like a long fever passing all at once, a moment of shaking and agony and relief. He became aware of his face being pressed hard against Clark's throat, and of the two of them drifting slowly through the cool dark, not far above the surface of the bay.

Bruce took a deep breath. He should say something, maybe. He ran his hands down Clark's back instead, and felt a contented sound reverberate through him.

Clark had been floating on his back like a swimmer with Bruce sprawled on his chest, but he drifted upright eventually, requiring Bruce to actually hang on to him. It was unclear to Bruce whether this was more or less dignified than lying draped atop Clark like a post-orgasmic ragdoll. His whole body still rang with satisfaction at every heartbeat; dignity, and the ramifications of their relationship, and the perpetual issue of whether some civilian had found where he'd hidden the Batmobile, all seemed far away as long as the two of them drifted together in this space between city and city, between water and stars, that seemed at this hour to belong only to them.

"Oh," Clark said, "I forgot to ask, how was the fight?"

"Cathartic," Bruce said lazily, and kissed Clark's laughing mouth.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for joining me for this exploration of the intrinsic eroticism of the gravitational force equivalent. I had a pretty rough time during the writing of this fic, between a ridiculously long work commute, an injury, and an illness — so I could not have been luckier than to be picked at claims by Kinko and mashimero, two incredibly fun, chill people who made gorgeous, fanciful, intimate art that I adore. Here are the links again:
> 
> [ art by G.G. Kinko/Cheese_kun, on Tumblr](https://gg-kinko.tumblr.com/post/186782555070/title-catch-a-falling-star-author-architeuthis)   
[art by mashimero, on AO3](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20113822)   
[masterpost on Tumblr](https://superbatbigbang.tumblr.com/post/186782740317/title-catch-a-falling-star-author)
> 
> [TKodami](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TKodami/) was my cheerleader and sounding board on this fic; I couldn't have done it without them. Psst, check out the amazing art they did for this bang.
> 
> I'd be remiss if I didn't also acknowledge the at least two real companies named Stericycle. One of them is under investigation for improper disposal of radioactive material, and another has one star in Google Reviews! This Stericycle is not meant to represent either of those companies, but I think we can safely conclude that the name is cursed.


End file.
